The Tragic, Liberal Delusion of Netflix’s ‘The Diplomat’

Image; Netflix

I remember first coming to Washington, DC, and hearing the way a lot of energetic interns and staff talked about the system. “Sure, it is flawed and annoying sometimes,” a colleague told me shortly after the 2016 election, us sipping coffees during a ‘quick chat’ in one of DC’s many gentrifying cafes, “But give it enough time, and it makes the right decisions.”

It was this conversation I thought of upon seeing the political thriller The Diplomat (2023 — present), a tightly crafted show about a career diplomat for the State Department named Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), who is suddenly transferred to the prestigious London office. We learn that this move is a test trial to see if she can handle the role of vice president, and along the way, Kate Wyler stumbles into a conspiracy that could drag the UK, and maybe even the US, into a regional war.

There were many good moments in this show. It was well-acted, the dialogue was witty and poignant, and the set design made me feel like I was there in this fast-paced environment. You can tell a lot of money was spent on this show, and it doesn’t appear to have been wasted (it’s been greenlit for a third season).

Yet, underpinning this show is the idea that the US empire should and must be preserved for the betterment of humanity, and I think that idea is worth dissecting.

It’s all about American Institutions (hegemony)

It’s worth noting that Kate Wyler is an institutionalist. There is a moment when the White House tries to pressure Wyler to take advantage of an Iranian diplomatic asset, and she urges caution instead. She delivers a moving speech on why the relationships maintained by the State Department are so important, saying:

“What were really doing when we negotiate with them, or with anyone, is looking for the one or two friends we can call when the world is fucked. It's a flimsy web of relationships. But sometimes, it holds. Do not tear it. Do not be an infinitely ravenous American.”

If there is a thesis of this show, it’s this monologue. The people who care about Global institutions, particularly ones that benefit the US — the adults in the room who you can call when the world is fucked — are the ones who need to be protected and in charge.

It’s perfectly fine for a character to hold that perspective — a character’s motivations are not interchangeable with a work of art’s motivations — but we never really get a competing narrative to make us think this isn’t the show’s perspective as well. There are so many moments where Kate and her confidants don’t report things to the public for fear that it would undermine US interests, and it’s framed as a commonsense position that doesn’t need a rebuttal.

For example, the main plotline of the first two seasons is that a British Warship called the HMS Courageous has been attacked by an unknown actor, killing 41 British service members. Kate Wyler is partly brought in because of her experience as a crisis diplomat, which gives her insight into untangling such flashpoints.

It’s learned, through a very entertaining cat and mouse game (spoilers, by the way), that this attack was a false flag operation by British operatives who wanted to give the Prime Minister, Nicol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear), an upswell of support he could use to prevent Scottland from seceding from the United Kingdom. A Scottish cession movement was picking up steam, and conservatives, led by British advisor Margaret Roylin (Celia Imrie), thought the rise in nationalism would “preserve the kingdom.” As US Vice President Grace Penn (Allison Janney) opines about Scotland’s possible secession (logic our POV character Kate also agrees with):

“If the UK eats itself alive, second wave impact, it’s a huge blow to NATO and Five Eyes. Third wave, Northern Ireland, Catalonia. Democracies carving themselves into splinters, while autocracy’s having its best year since ‘37.”

This perspective comes to a head with the twist that the person who really orchestrated the attack was, in fact, Vice President Grace Penn, who worried that a Scottish secession movement would threaten the only European port where US nuclear submarines are allowed to dock. The US, according to the Vice President, would lose the ability to track Russian submarines in the Atlantic, putting American Empire at risk from this larger geopolitical threat.

Kate does not refute the VP’s logic, later admitting that she might have done the exact same thing if she were in the VP’s shoes.

And so, just to recap, we have a democratic secession movement in Scotland — i.e., people trying to exercise their democratic right to self-determination — that is killed by conservative factions in two imperial governments who want to prevent the collapse of both of their empires.

And we are supposed to be okay with that; the framing of the text makes us want to empathize with the logic of these battle-weary veterans who are making difficult decisions to preserve American institutions. Decisions that, even if abhorrent, we are told repeatedly are ultimately justified. As Kate’s husband explains:

“If we make a thing out of [the US killing Scottish Independence], bad for Democracy…Hungry, Poland, Turkey…Democracy is actually going out of style. [It can’t come out].”

If US Empire collapses, the narratives suggest again and again, so too does the concept of Democracy itself.

A diplomatic conclusion

Upon finishing the second season, I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation with my friend years ago about how she thought preserving American institutions was good in and of itself, regardless of what those institutions do.

It’s how I used to think, too, almost a decade ago, but recently, I have come to see it as a worldview that can ultimately justify anything. If America needs to be maintained, if the United Kingdom must stand for fear that the vacuum will be even worse, then there are no horrors you can not justify: bomb your own ships, finance a country’s genocide, assassinate a left-leaning government that wants to nationalize its oil fields— anything to keep the wheels of empire turning.

In many ways, I felt like I was watching a modern-day update of The West Wing (1999–2006), which isn’t a compliment. For all the beautiful acting and cinematography, I was disappointed that we did not get more pushback on the show’s primary thesis. An uncritical viewer will probably walk away with the idea that the atrocities done by these characters are, from a birdseye view, justified — and that doesn’t bode well for most of us standing in the line of fire.

A Healthcare CEO Died: I Don’t Have It In Me To Care

CCTV of suspect leaving subway station

As you are probably aware, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down by (as of writing this) a yet-to-be-caught assassin in early December of 2024. The attack was potentially politically motivated, with the words deny, defend, and depose written on the shell casings left behind at the crime scene — a possible reference to the overly litigious (and malicious) tactics used by insurance companies.

The reaction to this killing was, much to the chagrin of centrist pundits everywhere, very positive. Immediately, people posted online celebrations of the murder. “I would offer thoughts and prayers, but I’m gonna need a prior authorization first,” one Reddit user allegedly joked shortly after the incident.

And just as quickly, there were condemnations from the center-right about how such celebrations were obscene. “The callous disregard for a human life is alarming to witness,” laments Ingrid Jacques in the Tennessean. “Slain UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Was a ‘Good Father’” goes the title of a People article.

Regardless of what you feel on this subject, it’s interesting that this conversation is fundamentally rooted in empathy for the person killed (automatically labeling them a victim) and not even entertaining the reasons that motivated said killing.

A framing that decenters the people Thompson hurt in the equation to tell a sanitized tale of his death.

Who should we care about?

The question of when and where violence is appropriate is largely contextual. From the American War of Independence to the French Revolution, most wars for independence were quite violent, and their appropriateness is continuously debated in retrospect.

Your mileage on violence’s acceptability will vary a lot depending on which institutions you hate and which ones you are keen to preserve.

For example, if you want to preserve the current system in its entirety, you’ll probably be in favor of the violence used by institutions to stop agitators (i.e., cops shooting at and teargassing protestors — a war crime), and vice versa for those who hate the state. There is a context in the background on which violence is acceptable and therefore “normal” and which is supposed to be invisible and ignored.

Fundamentally, the Brian Thompson discourse bothers me because it asks us to discard this context and judge this instance out of time. We are being asked not to unpack the circumstances that led to his death but rather to flatten the violence of this assassin into just a random action that happened. As Ingrid Jacques continues in that article:

“…people are reacting with anger and scorn to the death − not because a husband and father was fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk. But because of the victim’s job as head of a major health insurance company.”

Such pundits want to make the assassin’s violence the sole thing that is visible in the conversation.

Yet violence is always done in response to something, even if the only motivations are perceived grievances that do not really exist. Whether or not the violence is justified (it’s often not), the perpetrator is reacting to something in their environment, community, culture, and so forth that compels them to harm others.

Again, in the case of Brian Thompson’s assassin, they were most likely reacting to America’s dysfunctional and problematic healthcare system, specifically the fact that insurance companies frequently refuse to pay for the vital care of sick people. A robust KFF survey found that: “a majority of insured adults (58%) say they have experienced a problem using their health insurance in the past 12 months” — many claims of which were reported as unresolved.

United Healthcare, in particular, has implemented a harsh algorithm to reject claims swiftly. Casey Ross and Bob Herman of Stat News wrote of this problem in 2023:

“The nation’s largest health insurance company pressured its medical staff to cut off payments for seriously ill patients in lockstep with a computer algorithm’s calculations…the algorithm was to be followed precisely so payment could be cut off by the date it predicted.”

The tens of thousands of people who have died (and will continue to die) from decisions like this one — decisions that Brian Thompson had a hand in — are not centered in this conversation. People who die from negligent care often do not garner public outcries when they die but instead suffer violence that is mainly considered invisible. Such people are expected to die quietly, to whither away so those like Brian Thompson can profit from that suffering.

Our current institutions seem to be okay with the weaponized bureaucratic negligence (or violence) insurance companies enact against such people, but somehow, pundits want us to draw a red line toward the violence committed against one of the upholders of this terrible status quo. A calculus I have trouble wrapping my head around.

It’s always the rich who deserve empathy and never the countless people being f@cked over by them.

A sick conclusion

I don’t know if the violence committed against Brian Thompson was wrong — I don’t think that question is for me alone to answer — but I do know that how many pundits are having this conversation is woefully one-sided. Brian Thompson’s death did not happen in a vacuum; it was a reaction to actions he helped perpetuate. To harm he brought into this world.

And if that’s not going to be acknowledged, I don’t think I have it in me to care about his death.

The thing about our system is that it already forces us to limit our empathy. We pass dying people on the street all the time, and many do nothing because the dysfunction of our current system is too overwhelming for a single individual to grapple with. We don’t have the spoons (see spoon theory) to care, so sometimes we don’t, contributing ever so slightly to another person’s suffering.

Again, people are dying around me every day — so much so that I sometimes have to numb myself to get through it— and yet, in this discourse, I am being asked to stretch that limited supply of empathy to a rich man who perpetrated others’ suffering so he could live a good life.

Frankly, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to do so, especially since it’s a double standard not being returned by the rich. Many of the Brian Thompsons of the world do not empathize with the people they hurt — as they consider their violence to be natural and invisible. It's only when that violence is turned around on them that we are suddenly supposed to care.

And so, no, the rich do not get my empathy. A violent assassin killed a healthcare CEO, and I do not have any compassion left to give, and I don’t think I will for the next rich man, either.

LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back! We shouldn’t accept being a scapegoat

Image; Lucas Werkmeister

Trans rights are not great in this country. They never really have been, but in recent years, there has been an uptick in anti-trans sentiment.

States have started rolling back everything from restricting trans athletes from participating in athletic events that align with their gender to prohibiting those under the age of 18 from accessing gender-affirming care.

The state of Florida, in particular, has passed some of the most regressive laws in the nation. People can only use gendered facilities such as bathrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence centers, and prisons that match the gender they were assigned at birth. Another law has banned everyone under 18 from accessing gender-affirming care. The law has also allowed the state the right to temporarily take away the children of the parents who permit such care.

This shape of affairs is, if anything, picking up steam. Trump made his anti-trans messaging a significant part of his 2024 campaign, with one of Trump’s primary campaign promises being to stop gender-affirming care for minors. This is a promise that very much may come to fruition, considering that the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on this on December 4th. The whole country could start looking like Florida soon (if not probably much worse).

And so, what is the Democratic Party (and its center-left allies) doing in response to this worsening trend?

While there have been some calls for support, I see much of the political class trying to back away from defending my community. Commentators are telling the American public to decenter trans people, with Matthew Yglesias, for example, calling on the Democratic Party to view sex through an essentialist lens. Centrist politicians, according to Politico, have alleged that “identity politics and culture war issues need to take a backseat,” with Democratic representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) even doubling down on the position that transgender women should not participate in women’s sports.

A reactionary wave is coming for the entire LGBTQ+ community, and if nothing is done about it, we will experience a backslide felt by the queer community in the US for generations to come.

The backlash to the backlash

The thing about queerness, or whatever you want to call the diversity of gender and sexual expression across history, is that it’s not new (although how it has been framed in each culture has varied dramatically).

We don’t even have to look that far to see examples of this. Many indigenous tribes in the Americas were so beyond the European gender binary that it was undeniable. Going back to the 1500s, even colonizers were writing about Indigenous “men in women’s apparel.”

Yet, over the course of generations, that acceptance was undermined by settler colonialism. Native people were shamed (and, barring that, violently forced) into compliance until, eventually, the Christian-European standards for gender and sexuality became dominant. It’s something Europeans were openly bragging about. According to Indigenous scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, the 18th-century French Jesuit missionary Joseph-François Lafitau talked about this openly in a report he penned. Simpson summarized this report in her book, As We Have Always Done, writing:

“Lafitau ‘congratulates’ missionaries for ‘suppressing’ Indigenous queer relationships. He describes the missionaries’ success in prompting many queer Indigenous people and their relations to see their identity as ‘shameful.’ He was pleased to report that after seventy-five years of missionary work, people once ‘regarded as extraordinary men,’ had now, ‘come to be looked on, even by the Indians, with scorn.’”

It’s the same pattern worldwide — the demonization of same-sex relationships in India, the strict anti-queer legal code in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, etc. Our hatred of queer people was very much cultivated over generations by white-settler governments.

This trend did not start to reverse until the Post-Stonewall activism of the late 1960s and beyond when militant activists pushed their queer-phobic governments into recognizing them (feel free to read the Stonewall Reader for more context). As a result, these last few decades, we have seen the expansion of parental, marital, employment, and housing rights to some (though certainly not all) groups of queer people in the US, and it has improved the standards of living for many.

For those younger queers who were born in the shadow of this movement, it’s easy to think that this progress was and is inevitable, but it would be a mistake to assume that a similar project of anti-queerness cannot be restarted in the present era. As we have seen, it’s perfectly possible for a society to backslide, and in many ways, the US already has — hence all the anti-trans laws we mentioned at the beginning of this article.

It’s why recent calls by liberals and centrists to backpedal from trans rights are so dangerous because the rights that we have won are not inevitable, and with the complicity of democrats, they very much can be stripped away.

How to stop it

If these pundits have their way, Democrats will stop trying to whip votes against anti-trans and anti-lgbt legislation — a move that would essentially ensure that the politics of Florida are exported across the country.

We must not go back to the Pre-Stonewall days when queers had to hide their identities or risk being ostracized from society, and that means reminding our leaders of what will happen if they stop providing us support.

LGBTQIA+ people are a major constituency for the Democratic Party. Exit polls indicate that around 86% voted for Kamala Harris. We easily represent tens of millions of votes in districts and seats all across the country, and if our politicians aren’t even going to ensure we can continue to exist, then they shouldn’t get our votes. We need to let these leaders know that trans rights are a red line. I encourage you to contact your representatives and tell them they must support trans rights or risk alienating millions of LGBTQIA+ voters with this rhetoric.

And that is more important than a pundit bemoaning the state of ‘identity politics’ on his substack.

‘Wicked: Part I’ Shows Us How Fascism Is Already On Its Way

Image; Universal Pictures[

After I left the theater for the midnight showing of Wicked, dressed in green and wearing a floppy pink hat, the first thing I did upon getting home was cry. I cried so much because, like Cabaret and other musicals before it, its on-the-nose themes made me think about my own country and where we might be going.

Based on the 1995 Gregory Maguire title of the same name, Wicked is about the life of the infamous Wicked Witch of the West, referred to in this text as Elphaba. The book chronicles her life as she struggles against the authoritarian Wizard of Oz, a fascistic figure who scapegoats entire classes of people to stay in power, including, eventually, Elphaba herself.

It’s ultimately a tragic tale about how the winners of history can turn fighters for justice into villains.

The musical never abandoned this theme, but it does become less prominent, with the emotional core switching to Elphaba and Glinda’s relationship and the rise of Ozian authoritarianism becoming more of a B-plot. While Maguire’s original retelling had some flashy, risque elements, it’s undoubtedly more substantive than the musical. A large part of the book is about Elphaba’s activism — something the musical only briefly touches upon.

The movie is a hybrid of these two visions. It follows the structure of the musical but uses visuals to heighten the authoritarian (arguably fascist) aesthetic that first came from the book. We are aware of Ozian’s discriminatory nature throughout the film in a way that feels much more consequential than a simple B-plot.

In the wake of the 2024 election, where a right-wing authoritarian government has secured power, one can look at Wicked and almost see the edges of what a possible fascist future could look like, and it makes me incredibly sad.

The Fear of the Other

Again, Wicked, whether we are talking about the book, musical, or movie, has always been explicitly focused on fascism — i.e., a project of ultranationalist state-building that relies on myth-making to try to return the nation to a hyper-idealized, unrealized time.

In the film, our fascist leader is the Wizard of Oz, a fraud from the “real world” who took advantage of local myth to build himself up as a savior figure. When our leads — Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande-Butera), respectively — enter his capital, the Emerald City, we see this propaganda firsthand via the song One Short Day, where citizens praise him for allegedly saving Oz from misfortune. Most people view him as a reverential figure, even Elphaba, who initially aims to become his magical advisor (see The Wizard and I).

The Wizard, though, is a fraud who cannot cast the very magic he claims to have mastered. He instead uses cheap tricks and misdirections to maintain his power.

Yet, like any fascist, his project of ultranationalism doesn’t start and end with being charismatic. He has actively scapegoated the talking Animal population, using the public’s distrust of them following the Great Famine as a way to maintain order. As one professor lectures:

“There have been great changes throughout Oz with the rejection of animal culture. However, there was a time before you were born when life in Oz was different. When one could walk these halls and see a snow leopard solving an equation or an antelope explicating a sonnet. So when and why did this change?…[The Great Drought]. Food grew scarce and when people are hungry and angry, well, then they look for [someone to blame].”

From the film’s early moments, the viewer is shown the fallout from Oz’s backlash to animal culture. Sometimes, it is subtle. When Elphaba is born, all those in servant positions — from the maid bear Dulcibear (Sharon D. Clarke) to the Wolf Doctor (Jenna Boyd), who helps with the delivery — are animals. By the time we get to Elphaba’s young adulthood at Shiz University, her history teacher Dr. Dillamond (Peter Dinklage), a talking goat, has his chalkboard vandalized with the graffiti: Animals Should Be Seen Not Heard.

This fear of the “other” is a pervasive element of fascism. Scholar Umberto Eco, in his essay, Ur-Fascism, talked about how Fear of difference was a defining element of fascist governance, calling it an “appeal against the intruders” and “racist by definition.”

Eventually, Dr. Dillamond is sacked from the school, as animals are no longer permitted to teach. A new teacher enters the classroom and gives a demonstration of the “future,” where animals will be caged from such an early age that they never learn how to speak.

This fear of difference is not limited to a single minority group either but is more generalized. One of the reasons Elphaba becomes such a perfect scapegoat in the story is her green skin. People are disgusted by it. Whenever she enters a room, Elphaba is so used to people being reviled by the very sight of it that she defaults to explaining to strangers that she is not ill.

It was easy for the people of Oz to grow to hate her because they had already been trained to hate differences of any sort.

The subtext for this animosity is not subtle, especially since a Black actress plays Elphaba. We are supposed to link this hatred of a green-skinned person to our society’s systemic discrimination of Black and Brown people. Talking animals may be fictional, but our world has no shortage of scapegoated groups, and this reading opens the door to view animals as a stand-in for many different marginalized groups in US society, such as migrants, the unhoused, and, in my case, the transgender community.

Seeing Ozian society strip an entire group of people’s rights away, for me personally, makes it very hard not to think about trans people. From name changes to bathroom access to the right to gender-affirming care, various states are currently banning all sorts of gender expression, and that will most likely continue on the federal level this year.

We are headed to a very dark place. And if the road to hell is paved by good intentions, this film makes the case that the road to fascism is paved by people who look a lot like Glinda.

Fascism’s proponents

Elphaba’s relationship with Glinda or Galinda (she changed her name in faux solidarity with Dr. Dillamond) is the emotional core of this story, and it’s not a happy one. It’s not even shocking; in fact, it’s that lack of surprise that makes it so horrifying.

If I were to summarize Glinda’s arc, it would be a straight line, where she ends precisely where she started.

Glinda starts at Shiz University, powerful and privileged. There is a funny punchline where it's revealed that being denied the right to learn magic by the Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), is the first time Glinda has not gotten her way. She doesn’t want to think too deeply about things. While love interest Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey) is lying to himself when he sings the lyric, “Nothing matters, but knowing nothing matters” in the song Dancing Through Life, Glinda seems to believe it because her circumstances have never had her need to question the status quo.

Everything in her life has been fine, and she doesn’t understand (or, more like, doesn’t want to understand) why that approach doesn’t work for everyone. The advice she gives to Elphaba in the fan-favorite song Popular reflects this outlook. The song essentially encourages assimilationism. She tells Elphaba to learn to dress in the right way and say the right things, and she, too, will be popular—as if marginalized people can smile and nod at their oppressors into solidarity.

Glinda never admits it directly, but she resents Elphaba. It frustrates her that Elphaba has lucked into the one thing she wants but cannot have, and Glinda bullies Elphaba for a large portion of the film. To the point where Elphaba’s only real friend for much of it is Dr. Dillamond.

In the film, Glinda and Elphaba’s relationship only begins to develop because Elphaba gives Glinda the thing she wants. She convinces the Dean of Sorcery, Madame Morrible, to teach Glinda magic, and that kindness makes Glinda feel guilty enough to intervene in a humiliating situation on Elphaba’s behalf.

It’s not clear she would have still done this if Elphaba had not first convinced Madame Morrible to teach Glinda magic.

While the two become friends — replete with a makeover and everything — this dynamic does not change. Glinda is never willing to put aside her own self-interest to help others. When Elphaba asks her classmates if they will do anything after Dr. Dillamond is forcibly removed from class, Glinda remains in her seat. When both Elphaba and Glinda learn that the Wizard is a fraud imposing cultural genocide on talking animals, she spends her time trying to convince Elphaba not to defect.

Glinda’s arc in this first film is that she has the potential to change — to be something else, something better — and she chooses not to.

The truth is that fascism doesn’t hurt everyone. Umberto Eco described it as relying on a “selective populism” where “the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

The animals don’t benefit from Ozian fascism, but people like Glinda do.

It’s unsurprising that she decides not to help Elphaba in the struggle against Ozian fascism as she benefits from staying in line, but it’s still heartbreaking. One of the things that caused me to cry after leaving the theater was realizing how many Glindas there will be in my life over the next few years—people who care about me, people who even say they love me but aren’t willing to make that leap and do something about it.

Instead, they will not only step aside but, like Glinda, enforce the very things that hurt me.

I am seeing a lot of self-professed liberals and leftists looking at the 2024 election and concluding that the thing that caused them to lose was being too supportive of trans rights. Commentators and politicians are currently writing op-eds and giving interviews about how we should distance ourselves from the trans community — from people like me.

And this distancing — this abandoning of a small population to appeal to a far-right government — scares me because such a move tends to go poorly for the group being scapegoated.

And sadly, it’s as American as apple pie.

An American conclusion

It needs to be highlighted that within the film, Ozian fascism did not come from Oz but was directly imported from America. The Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) flew here to Oz on a balloon, and he tells Elphaba how he is merely copying what his leaders do back home:

“When I first got here, there was discord. There was discontent. And back where I come from [i.e. America], everybody knows that the best way to bring folks together is to give them a real good enemy.”

There is something very peculiar about one of the biggest films in the world right now pointing to the ingrained problem of American fascism, and yet our country is still heading in that direction anyway. Our society recognizes the problem intellectually, but the moment things become about reality (and not merely just fiction), support for fighting fascism appears to wane.

It seems that my fellow Americans will accept one set of morals in the theater and another in real life, that we have more empathy for fictional talking animals on the Silver Screen than marginalized citizens like trans people in the United States.

So you see, this movie made me cry because something bad isn’t just happening in Oz.

Star Wars Has Been Struggling with the Slavery of Droids For A Long Time

Slavery has been a core theme in the Star Wars universe for a long time. Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd/Hayden Christensen) — the Jedi Knight who would betray the Jedi Order and become a key figure in the rise of the Galactic Empire — began his life as an enslaved person on the desert planet of Tatooine. His decision to leave behind his enslaved mother, Shmi (Pernilla August), to join the Jedi Order (and his inability to help her) is partly what drives him to the Dark Side.

Human slavery is framed as abhorrent in this universe (because it is in every universe). We empathize with Anakin and are meant to see his “owner,” a junk-dealing alien named Watto (Andy Secombe), as disgusting. Watto is a potbelly grifter, and our leads in The Phantom Menace (1999) have to outsmart him to get the spaceship part they need.

Likewise, Jabba the Hutt (played by Larry Ward and puppeteers Toby Philpott, Mike Edmonds, and David Barclay) is a prominent slaver and crime syndicate boss in the original series (see Return of the Jedi), and he is quite literally a giant worm guarded by walking pigs. We are meant to be sickened by his very presence and the institution of slavery he represents.

Yet this same empathy for organic enslaved persons has historically not been extended to droids in the Star Wars franchise (see Pop Culture Detective’s The Tragedy of Droids in Star Wars), who are almost all owned by an organic. These characters are routinely portrayed as having emotions, pain, and desires, but they are also framed in the narratives as comedic punchlines or faceless villains.

Rarely are they given the actual agency of their human counterparts, even the ones who are likewise enslaved.

Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, the company has been struggling with the implications of this issue. Multiple mainstream properties have grabbled with droid enslavement and personhood in a way that we haven’t seen before, and it might be too little, too late.

A beeping history

It’s well noted that one of the inspirations for the first Star Wars film is Akira Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (1958) — a Japanese samurai movie about two oafish peasants unknowingly guiding a general and a princess across enemy territory in exchange for gold.

Hidden Fortress’s influence on Star Wars particularly applies to the most famous characterization of droids in the Star Wars universe — C-P30 and R2-D2. They are partly based on the two peasants in the film, Tahei (Minoru Chiaki) and Matashichi (Kamatari Fujiwara), the comedic relief characters that bumble around as the general and princess characters do more serious work.

There is a classist framing here, as, throughout the film, the peasant’s greed causes them to constantly lose and retrieve the gold promised to them — the thing separating them from the nobles focused on more serious things. We are meant to see their antics as almost childish. After losing the gold a final time, the film ends with them ironically getting a single bar of gold as a reward. One, they are finally able to share after being commanded to do so by the princess.

It can be argued that this hierarchy between serfs and lords was recontextualized by Lucas in the Star Wars universe as between owner and droid.

As with the peasant-noble relationship in Hidden Fortress, we might be encouraged to feel or root for a droid helping its owner in a particular scene, but never enough to assess the deeply unfair status quo. C-3PO may quip about its unfair lot, and a Droid in Jabba’s Palace may scream out in pain after getting tortured, but at the end of the day, it’s not an injustice because they are not framed as persons.

Yet, this status quo has been slowly shifting. While there has been some mention of attempted droid autonomy in legacy books and short stories (such as Kevin J. Anderson’s Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88) in more popular pieces of media, we can trace the origin of this trend to the droid L3–37 (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) in the much-maligned title Solo (2018).

Throughout this fictional biopic about how the smuggler Han Solo (Alden Ehrenreich) got his start, secondary robot protagonist L3–37 or L3 frames the oppression of droids as an injustice. As she says to another droid: “They are using you for entertainment. You’ve been neurowashed. Don’t just blindly follow the program. Exercise some free will!”

And yet, she is mocked for this sense of justice. In one example, her owner, Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover), asks her if L3–37 needs anything. She sarcastically quips, “Equal rights,” and Calrissian just sighs. L3–37 is ultimately framed as a social justice warrior who won’t stop complaining about her second-class status — and for some reason, that’s supposed to be annoying. Her narrative ends not with her freedom but with her consciousness being uploaded to the Millennium Falcon —her agency stripped away.

In Solo, the idea of droid autonomy is introduced unseriously, and that’s more or less where the series has remained until this year.

Another example of droid autonomy that feels underbaked is how C-3PO is treated in The Rise of Skywalker (2019), the last film in the most recent trilogy. A common practice in the Star Wars universe is for owners to erase the memories of their droids for both general maintenance and as a security measure. This effectively kills them, as their consciousness is erased and reverts to an earlier setting.

C-3PO willingly gets wiped to help his owners with plot shenanigans. He gives a passionate monologue about saying goodbye to his friends, and the film hardly skips a beat before our leads move on to the next thing. Protagonist Rey (Daisy Ridley) is, in fact, overjoyed to learn mere seconds later that an organic she thought dead is alive.

C-3PO’s memory ultimately gets restored haphazardly by R2-D2, but it’s an earlier backup — he still died, even if it’s not framed that way in the text. It is also not really a moment of celebration among the organics like the rescue of other characters is.

Yet perhaps the best in-universe examination of this theme comes from the recent video game Star Wars: Outlaws (2024), which is unfortunate because the game is not very good. The theme of droid agency is explored directly with the character ND-5 (Jay Rincon). He is the partner-in-crime and handler of protagonist Kay Vess (Humberly González,) as she attempts to recruit a crew across the galaxy to pull a once-in-a-lifetime heist.

ND-5, a droid created for war, is aware of his lack of agency, and he’s not particularly thrilled about it, saying: “I was created to destroy. I didn’t concern myself with why. It can be difficult for organics to understand.”

He lacks free will on a fundamental level, and for a series so uncurious about the agency of artificial intelligence, it was almost surprising to see.

This theme is further highlighted in the final act of the game, when ND-5's owner, Jaylen Vrax (Eric Johnson), betrays Kay and forces ND-5 to fight her. Kay dodges ND-5’s laser fire behind crates and inside air ducts, but she never abandons him, making it her mission to free the droid from his restraining bolt (i.e., the technology that forces him to follow orders) and, consequently, from Jaylen Vrax’s control.

She succeeds with this objective and ends the game by calling ND-5 her family, a level of personhood that I haven’t seen in a lot of Star Wars media — one that hopefully opens the door for a possible shift in how this franchise frames droid personhood.

A robotic conclusion

The way I broke down Outlaws might make it sound like I think Star Wars has entered a progressive era with this issue, but I actually think it might be too little ground too late.

Examining the personhood of artificial life is one of the most basic themes in science fiction. It goes all the way back to the Golden Age with Isaac Asmiov’s The Robot Series (1940-95). Whether we are talking about Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) or the synthetic Geth in the Mass Effect series (2007–12), this is well-trodden ground at this point.

The fact that Star Wars is only getting to this now speaks to a level of stagnation with the property.

Furthermore, the way the personhood of these droids is framed by the affections and attachments of their human owners is paternalistic. Because Rey and Kay grow to like C-3PO or ND-5, these robots are framed emphatically. But the other droids in the series? They often get blasted to bits. These pieces of media are more about an individual narrative of chosen family rather than one of emancipation or demonizing the institution of droid slavery.

It’s not that I expect a full droid slave revolt in the next Disney+ show (though it can’t hurt), but it would be nice if, at the very least, the heroes we are supposed to like recognize that enslaving a sentient being is wrong. By nature of our leads being comfortable with this institution — it’s hard for me to like them.

The Star Wars galaxy may be far, far away, but its rejection of slavery shouldn’t be.

You Can Stop the Collapse of Democracy by Finding Your People

When Trump ascended to the presidency in 2016, there was a call to support existing institutions. John Oliver, on his show Last Week Tonight, urged viewers to donate to nonprofits such as Planned Parenthood and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, as well as to subscribe to newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times (see Season 3, Episode 30: President-Elect Trump).

A lot of people did that: there was a considerable increase in newspaper subscriptions and philanthropic giving in 2016 (note: I am not suggesting John Oliver is singularly responsible for this). It was an across-the-board bump. Even groups on the left, such as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), had their membership swell. These institutions were supercharged as bulwarks to protect American democracy.

Yet here we are—Trump has once again ascended to power. All that stands in his administration’s way is an ineffectual Democratic Party, a nonprofit scene beholden primarily to wealthy donors, leftist influencers building up their brands, grassroots groups holding on by the skin of their teeth, and, god willing, Donald Trump’s own incompetence. It’s safe to say that this strategy of strengthening liberal institutionalism has failed us in stopping the rise of right-wing authoritarianism.

In the following weeks and years, many groups will sell you on the idea of joining their organizations, subscribing to their newsletter, and volunteering for their efforts to stop our slide into fascism, and I am here to urge caution before you do that. While joining a group is ultimately necessary (you can do more with others than alone), the most recent election has proved that the work of these groups does not lead to success.

We need to ensure that we do not funnel our money, and most importantly, our time, into the same ineffectual organizations, institutions, and groups that failed us the first time.

Don’t throw yourself at the first thing

When it comes to selecting an organization or group to support with your time, money, and reputation, impulse alone cannot be what seals the deal. The groups with the most appealing ad campaigns and the largest number of influencers online are rarely the ones with healthy and sustainable communities.

There are a lot of popular liberal and leftist groups that have had various leadership scandals. Several years ago, then-president Alphonso David of the Human Rights Campaign — a huge LGBT+ organization — had to resign in disgrace for allegedly helping former Governor Andrew Cuomo cover up a sexual harassment scandal. Sexual harassment scandals are sadly quite common among many center-left nonprofits and have affected everyone from Oxfam to the Humane Society.

However, it’s not a problem with just the center-left. For example, the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) has long dodged allegations of sexual harassment within its organization, including infamously the case surrounding the alleged sexual assault by member Steven Powers.

Be mindful of what kinds of leaders these groups are attracting.

Furthermore, even if their leadership is squeaky clean, every longstanding group has an approach that you may not entirely agree with. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) values all citizens being able to exercise their rights equally and therefore defends groups you may disagree with, such as authoritarian provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and even Donald Trump from his temporary Facebook ban. Some have accused the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of being too electorally-minded. Food Not Bombs tends to follow a methods-oriented approach over a top-down direction. Depending on your outlook, these approaches are either terribly inefficient or the best way to structure things.

What, if any, of these approaches appeal to you?

Again, it’s vital to research these groups before you hit that membership or donate button. Learning a baseline about how these groups operate is critical work that needs to be done before joining them.

Some helpful questions to ask:

• How do these groups make decisions?

• Do you agree with that structure?

• How can a knowledgeable insider take advantage of that structure?

• What have these groups’ mistakes been?

• How have these mistakes been rectified or buried?

Your donations, time, and efforts will be used by these groups in their next fundraising email or maybe even their leaders’ next escape from accountability. It’s better to start asking these questions before an inflection point is reached, not after.

Finding a community might take some work

Furthermore, you might have to accept that the group for you — the one that clicks everything into place — might not come up on a simple Google Search. It might not even have a website. Your people might not currently be coherently organized at all.

And so, how do you find these people? Or, how do you let yourself be found?

Paradoxically, I don’t think self-appointed political groups that put out “Stand Together” ads or have clipboards preaching about the “coming revolution” are what you should seek out. My political home — the radicals still with me and whom I call family — wasn’t found at an ideologically progressive or radical organization. I found it at a board game night and a writer’s group. These were communities built in between the cracks—places where queer nerds felt safe. Physical and sometimes virtual spaces where we talked about our traumas and baggage, and slowly, politics started to spring up. We would talk about what we wanted, which quickly morphed into what we should do.

Finding your people involves seeking out something similar, but not the same: a local fan group for an edgy, leftist musician, an online buy nothing page where people giveaway and ask for things in their local area for free, a Discord server about a comedian trolling people on the far right, a book club on radical politics, or an in-person trans support meeting at a coffee shop. Places where community, not just campaigns to pass specific policy, already exists, even if it’s tenuous — even if you might be needed to keep it going.

It’s these spaces you have to find because they will lead to more direct political action. The things you like and the spaces you seek out are not apolitical. When you find your people amongst the geeky video game conventions, local hiking groups, and punk concerts, you will quickly realize that many people who like the things you do happen to share some of your values.

These communities, especially ones linked to a particular geography, are not just consumer preferences but potential constituencies—groups with needs that many members may be willing to fight for.

Get together with these groups (preferably in person), and you will be amazed by what arises from it. You start chatting with your Star Wars nerds about some of the sexism they’ve experienced at a local con, and that conversation becomes the basis for a panel the following year. Your buddy complains about never having enough to eat, and your friends start putting on a local potluck. You gripe to your best friend about a leader you can’t stand, and out of that conversation, learn that an anti-ICE coop is protesting said leader and decide to go together.

Political actions should not be something you do alone, like some extracurricular activity, but actions you do with and evolve from your interactions with the people you respect and love.

An active conclusion

A lot of people take a policy-over-community approach. They put all their hopes into a policy they think will save them (e.g., Medicare-for-all, the Green New Deal, a Universal Basic Income, etc.) and hope that a community will evolve around it—a wonkish group of nerds that harangue politicians and key figures until the thing is passed.

Yet you build community—not by supporting a top-down policy that you’ve decided will work — but by joining and participating in it. You learn who your people are and what they need (preferably by having a f@cking conversation with them), and then do something about those needs.

It’s these communities—not a newspaper owned by a billionaire or a nonprofit funded by one—that need to be found, supported, and built over the next few years.

And you are vital to making that work happen.

‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Could Have Been Great

Image; EA

Dragon Age: The Veilguard (2024) is the fourth title in the Dragon Age series, a standard grim dark fantasy world where elves are oppressed, magic is a loose metaphor for addiction, and religious oppression abounds. This latest outing stars the protagonist Rook, who is in charge of a team of specialists known as the Veilguard, trying to stop old Elven Gods from releasing a plague onto the world.

This game could have used an extra year or so to refine its various issues. Bugs were too common. I would notice that audio would not trigger for many moments, and I more than once fell through a wall or phased into a pillar, which forced me to reload a save file. The dialogue was famously clunky, especially its unskippable opening hours that set up the story.

These flaws (and more) led to a game that was middling in quality — not terrible, not great — just sort of okay.

It’s an unfortunate outcome because a good game is buried underneath all this blunder. Between the bugs and frustrating level design, there is a beautiful reflection on grief and regret, and I wanted to highlight those themes and focus on what could have been.

The good game beneath the surface

The first God the Veilguard is tasked with defeating is Solas, the elven God of Lies — at least according to the myth. He wants to tear down the Veil, a force dividing the material plane where elves, dwarves, and humans live, and the Fade, a magical land of memory and emotion. His destruction of the Veil would allow for spirits and demons from the Fade to flood into our world, killing many people in the process.

It’s an undesirable action but one that makes sense as you come to understand this God’s psychology. Solas is motivated, first and foremost, by regret. A long time ago, he organized an anti-slavery rebellion against the other elven Gods or Evanuris — petty warlords who passed themselves off as deities and used that standing to enslave their elven worshippers.

Solas constructed the Veil to imprison these Gods, and it, unfortunately, had devastating impacts on Elven society. Elves were heavily reliant on magic from the Fade, and when the Veil was put up, their cities crumbled, their immortality waned, and they became vulnerable to external threats. Humans usurped the remains of the Elven empire — their land colonized and stolen until all that was left of them was a migratory diaspora known as the Dales.

Solas blames himself for these events, and in tearing down the Veil, he wants to rewind history. As he tells your player character: “This world is broken, Rook, because of my mistakes.”

Do you see how compelling this motivation is?

The Veilguard was originally titled Dreadwolf, based on one of Solas’s many names, and I can see why: his emotional struggle is the core of this story. Throughout the Veilguard, your character has these back-and-forth quips with Solas in the Fade, and they were the most engaging element of the game for me. Whether learning his perspective about the Dalish or hearing out the rationalization for his plan to destroy the Veil, we come to understand him as someone whose pride prevents him from moving past his regret.

Yet regret motivates not just the Elvish God of Lies but also the other antagonists. When the Veilguard stops Solas from breaking down the Veil, two different Gods — Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain — are released into the world. They are motivated by this same emotional impulse. Their biggest regret is the collapse of their empire, and they are willing to unleash a plague (i.e., the blight) to recapture that old glory. “Every pointed spire,” Elgar’nan monologues, “and warding enchantment in this city is a child’s unwitting imitation of the empire I built. I would have restored the glory your lives are too brief to remember.”

Solas and the Evanuris are mirrors of one another. They both want to implement a reactionary plan that will risk the lives of millions in the process. The only difference is the time they wish to return to. Solas wants to turn the clock shortly after the Elvish rebellion won and the Evanuris before the rebellion existed.

What makes our heroes heroes is not the absence of regret — members of the Veilguard are also weighed down by unfinished relationships — but their ability to embrace their regrets and consequently process those feelings. A significant part of the plot involves helping your party move on from various types of psychological trauma so that they will be in a better position to kill the Gods.

One of the most direct examples involves the companion character, Bellara, an elf with an unfinished relationship with her brother. Her quest ends with his funeral, where you must guide her through metaphorical obstacles to grief.

Moments like this were moving, some even bringing me to tears, and it was disappointing that a game with such a mesmerizing theme was so buggy and incomplete.

A regretful conclusion

Now, many games (as well as most artworks) are just okay. A lot of video games are, at best, fun distractions and, at worst, jingoistic propaganda with predatory gambling mechanics.

There are plenty of games that are worse than Veilguard.

And yet, this game wasn’t trying to be mediocre. There was a serious attempt to grapple with themes of regret, revolution, and pride that are rare for a AAA title to discuss. Going into Veilguard, I was honestly worried that Solas would be just another revolutionary with “the right intentions” but “going too far.” And instead, we got a well-rounded villain with believable psychological motivations.

There is this sense that, with just a little bit more time, this game could have been great — and for a title about regret, that’s almost poetic.

‘Agatha All Along’ Is The Evil Queerness We’ve Been Waiting For

Image; Disney

I walked away, loving Agatha All Along (2024), the WandaVision (2021) spinoff about the evil witch named Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) who goes on an adventure with a begrudgingly formed coven on the “Witches’ Road” for glory and power.

I loved the set design and cinematography. The use of color theory was quite apt, as every character was linked to a particular color that was tied to the greater mythology of the show (i.e., yellow for divination magic, red for protection, blue for potions, and so forth). This pattern was so ingrained that an astute viewer could tell what challenge was next based on the color of the leaves on the Witches’ Road.

As a musical theater nerd, I also couldn’t help but love the song The Ballad of the Witches’ Road, which the show was centered on. It thematically resonated with the major themes of the series and was additionally quite catchy.

The figure I loved most of all, however, was the titular Agatha, who represents a prime example of what queer evil can look like in media, and I think she’s iconic.

Evil never sleeps

Agatha is, to sidestep the pun for a moment, an evil b!tch. She is unapologetic in her cruelty, having hurt an untold number of people — something she hilariously jokes about in the episode If I Can’t Reach You / Let My Song Teach You, saying: “I mean, I’ve killed…my share.”

And then we get to the last episode, and I think the twist here is clever because it subverts our expectations. Throughout the series, we are led to believe that Agatha has valid reasons for her duplicitousness. It is revealed earlier that she had a son who died, and the grief of that is what is implied to have propelled her toward evil.

In Maiden, Mother Crone, we see how these events happened. Her sick son, Nicholas Scratch (Abel Lysenko), died during childbirth, but because she had a love affair with death itself (Aubrey Plaza), she was given more time with him, but it’s implied at a cost. Every so often, Agatha and her son (who played the role of the bait) had to kill other witches so he could go on living.

Yet one day, he refused to play his part in the deal, and so death came to collect.

Normally, this is where a morally “righteous” show would end. We would learn here that Agatha was only doing this evil to protect her child. It’s this history where the story of her evil would be born, morphing into something more fiction than fact. It would be a reputation she, as a good woman, bore quietly, all in the name of preserving the conservative family structure, and in that way, we would be meant to empathize with and maybe even (eventually) forgive her.

It’s the same rationale we saw in WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), where the grief Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) had for her lost lover and children was what propelled her to commit evil. She is circumstantially evil, and her “sins” are ultimately balanced out with a heroic enough sacrifice.

And yet, that’s not what happened in Agatha All Along. Her murderous rampage picks up after Nicholas’s death, not before.

On their murderous adventure together, Agatha and Billy invented the song The Ballad of the Witches’ Road. It was something that they started to perform while traveling up and down America as part of the con to attract witches so that Agatha could kill.

After Nicholas’s death, The Ballad of the Witches’ Road had solidified as a piece of American folklore, and real witches started to pursue it. That’s when Agatha stepped in, offering guidance as the one witch who claimed to have gotten to the end of the road. It was all a con that Agatha pulled to absorb other witches’ powers (note: she has succubus-like powers that allow her to drain other witches if they attack her). And so, after performing the ballad to summon the Witches’ Road and failing (because it didn’t really exist), she would mock the aspirants until they attacked her.

In Maiden, Mother Crone, we see a chilling montage play as Agatha pulls this con throughout the ages. She has killed generations of witches, and there is no remorse there. Even the heroic sacrifice she makes in the penultimate episode to save the young witch Teen (Joe Locke) from Death isn’t really noble. “By the way,” she lectures Teen after becoming a ghost, “I did not sacrifice myself for you. I took a calculated risk.”

Agatha is not redeemable and does not particularly want to be.

In many ways, this embrace of evil is refreshing. We are still living in the shadow of The Hay’s Code (1934–1968) and The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 to 1983), where narratives always had to have a morally clear message when dealing with “evil” characters.

When I think of many classic Disney Villains during the Code, particularly witches, they received unambiguous moral retributions: the Evil Queen (Don Brodie) falls to her death (see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937), Maleficent (Eleanor Audley) is slain by a prince (see Sleeping Beauty, 1959), and so forth. Even after both Codes were done away with, this legacy continued. The sea witch Ursula (Pat Carroll) is impaled by the bow of a ship (see The Little Mermaid, 1989). Voodoo priest Dr. Facilier (Keith David) is dragged to the other side (see Princess and the Frog, 2009).

Disney has started to reckon with this legacy. The Snow Queen Elsa (Idina Menzel) is not killed for plunging the land of Arendelle into snowy darkness (Frozen, 2013), and even the abuela (María Cecilia Botero) in Encanto (201) receives a hug rather than a poetic death. Likewise, the sequel to Hocus Pocus made pains to distinguish between the bad witches of the original film and the good ones who are our protagonists.

It’s refreshing to likewise see that empathy extend to an evil queer like Agatha.

A witchy conclusion

As I wrote in the beginning, Agatha is an evil b!tch. She has always been evil, and we are not meant to think anything differently as the season comes to a close. She sees no problem in sacrificing her own kind to get ahead, and while that makes her despicable, I don’t want to return to the morality of the Hays Code, where all art must end in a certain way to underscore particular values.

Furthermore, there is something beautiful about queerness, not needing to bend itself to modern morality, and on a Disney show, no less.

We were the villains for so long — the serial killers, groomers, and deviants — because it was an archetype thrust upon us. And for a while, there was a concerted effort to only push for “positive” representation to counterbalance that trend. Tropes such as the “depraved bisexual” and the “promiscuous queer” were seen as damaging by some advocates because they were all we could be.

Yet queer people are people, and our media representation should be as diverse as our humanity. We should not just be heroes and sidekicks but killers (see Killing Eve), criminal masterminds (see Mr. Robot), and everything dark under the sun — our humanity centered each step of the way.

For while I would hate Agatha in real life, on the screen, she’s an evil I adore.

Queers Need To Realize That Elections Won’t Save Us

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

It’s heartbreaking when a terrible man ascends to power. Every time this happens, and it’s by no means a unique experience in America, we are reminded of just how horrible our system is. And when that man is the next leader of your country — a man who campaigned trampling on your very identity — a whole lot of people crash against that realization at the same time.

Trump will be president, and he didn’t need a coup d’état to get there. He didn’t have to encourage sheriffs to deputize half of America. He merely achieved it through the normal transition of power.

That’s been happening a lot recently, hasn’t it?

Trump. W. Bush. Reagan. Our system sure is electing people every few decades who reliably upend everything for the worse, and this time will be no different. Americans will have to fight against potential rollbacks to our bodily autonomy, our healthcare, and so much more.

As us queers reckon with all the work we will have to do to preserve and expand our rights, its comes time we face the fact that the current electoral strategy has failed us and that a bottoms-up approach is needed.

Elections take too much

Every time an election goes terribly (i.e., a conservative reactionary, and in this case, a fascist gains power), I see an effort to relitigate the specifics of the campaign. What could have been done differently? What voter outreach did XYZ politician miss? What political strategy or issue did the candidate, in retrospect, need to back away from or embrace?

In essence, what and who is to blame? Is it Russia? Leftists? Young people? Those against genocide? China? What group selfishly didn’t vote, and who should we have paid more attention to?

All of these critiques focus on the substance of a particular campaign rather than on the form of how we organize — i.e., an emphasis on short-term electoral campaigns and how to run them. After every defeat, we are encouraged to reroll the dice in two and four years’ time, hoping for better results. We have to vote harder. Donate more. That’s the proposed solution repeatedly, and it’s a failure.

I think that structurally, elections can be elitist (see my reasoning here), but even if you disagree with that point, it cannot be denied how big of a drain on resources they are. Every election cycle, billions are burned in spending on staffers and ads, with this year breaking records. Billions are now spent every year, even during non-presidential cycles.

More than just money, we overtax the people who are the backbone of such campaigns. Staffers and volunteers are thrown into a chaotic environment that will burn them out within a few months, not because of the results of the race but often because the work environments of campaigns are profoundly unhealthy. As Jesse M. writes of their involvement in the 2020 election cycle:

Part of what makes our electoral system so terrible is its system of what jobs do exist. Most people who work in politics do so for very short stretches of time, like I did. If you make it through one campaign cycle and work into the next one, you’re an aged, rugged veteran. The person who hired me, two levels of experience above me, was 21 years old at the time.

So much of our time and energy is spent on these short campaigns that will not connect to anything more significant once they are over. Maybe a candidate wins (a big if), and their volunteers and staff get a win under their belts, but often, that’s all it is. Those efforts translate into the individual advancements of a politician’s career, with no guarantee that they will even stand by what they campaigned on.

In fact, it’s often accepted wisdom at this point that many such promises are lies. You spend all of this energy on something and then send your efforts into the ether, hoping “your candidate” does the work they promised now that you, as a voter, have no leverage to make that happen.

It’s a backward approach to gaining power. You are spending resources upfront in the hope of getting “amenable enough” people so you can start building what you need. The supposed aim is to elect leaders who will pass legislation permitting us to make the systems of care we need to survive. And every election cycle, we keep volunteering and donating more and more to keep this gamble going, and it isn’t working.

I propose — and I am not the first to advance this today, let alone this century — that we work on building what we need, irrespective of who is in power.

That, first and foremost, we create, invest in, expand, and care for grassroots groups, mutual aid networks, defense leagues, community newspapers, and more that will allow us to build power in a decentralized way. Groups that stick around longer than a six-month campaign and whose growth will not impair our freedom if a terrible leader ever steps in.

One of the problems with the presidency (and many current executive positions) is that so much power is centralized around them that bad leadership is catastrophic. You lose the presidency once, setting you back a decade or more.

Trump is going to roll back a lot of rules and appoint a lot of judges, and that does not even get into the laws he’ll pass. Even in an ideal case where a person of your ideological persuasion wins (unlikely in my case), the momentum of the institutions the presidency governs cannot be halted and reversed quickly. It can take years to reverse a decision made by a bad presidency — if the moment ever comes at all.

That’s a lot of eggs to put in one proverbial basket.

In decentralized groups, that domino effect doesn’t happen as much. You pour resources into many groups, and if a bad leader arises (something that is inevitable), nothing is keeping you there. The group withers. Members leave and spin their efforts into different things — something that happens all the time. From the DSA to Black Lives Matter, many progressive and leftist projects owe their existence to a split (and maybe a merge and split again) from another organization.

This process of destruction and rebirth (of reacting to change) is healthy in movement-building. Change is unavoidable. It’s not a failure for people to remain committed activists under a different organization, group, collective, coop, or whatever the hell you want to call it.

And yet we have somehow gotten it in our heads that unserious people work on building long-term groups and communities, while serious people throw all their resources into short-term efforts that will not only cease to exist several months down the line but have to be continuously restarted anew in not much time at all.

It’s a kind of madness that needs to stop.

A conclusion

Queers are on the edge of society. We are poorer, and we are one of the more recent scapegoats fascist reactionaries are using to gain power. We can’t afford to wait to reroll the dice. We need things now, which means building things in the present, not continuously pointing to the hazy future of the next election.

There are so few activists out there, and even fewer are building community or, to extend my earlier metaphor, weaving new baskets. Most of us are being directed to drop all our eggs into the single, unwieldy basket of electoralism and then get upset when it breaks.

But it’s going to break because all things do.

The goal is to build so many different baskets that it doesn’t matter if one of them tears a sunder. To build mutual aid networks, to roll out strike funds, to found worker coops, to teach queer defense classes, to host regular potluck meals so your friends can eat, to take a shift at the community kitchen or garden (or make one if it doesn’t exist), to backup banned books and films, to begin scrutinizing your local businesses and politicians, to knock on your neighbors door and say hello, and all the little things you can do to build real community.

Communities that can vote in an election and exist long after it ends.

‘The Perfect Couple’ & The Long, Complicated History of Sex Work’s Depiction In Media

Image; Netflix

‘Rich people doing murders’ is a favorite topic of television. Whether talking about Revenge (2011–2015) or Big Little Lies (2017–2025), there is something intriguing about watching the wealthy grapple with murder (particularly their own), the one problem they cannot yet buy their way out of.

The Perfect Couple (2024) is a limited series that revels in the opulence of the Nantucket-summering Winbury family as they move about the world in bright pastels and refined perfection. The show’s theme song, Criminals by Meghan Trainor and J.bird, plays at the start of every episode, with the Winbury wedding party performing a perfectly choreographed flash dance to it.

Throughout the series, we are meant to question the ‘perfect’ facade this family puts on and take a visceral pleasure as it crumbles.

It was a surprise when sex work became such a central element of the show, especially when it was not an object of mockery but of strength for one of the main characters. It’s this (mostly) positive portrayal that I want to talk about today as we contextualize it into a bitter and evolving history of sex work on the Silver Screen.

A brief recap of sex work’s portrayal in film and TV

Sex work (i.e., one’s sale of sexual, intimate, and often emotional labor for direct material compensation) has a contentious place in US society. It remains primarily illegal, and “wh*re” or “pr*stitute” are derogatory labels spoken all over this country as insults.

For the longest time, we saw this disdain reflected in how sex work was portrayed in media. The Hays Code (1934–1968) and The Code of Practices for Television Broadcasters (1952 to 1983) prohibited the positive portrayal of sex work, as well as any sexual and romantic relationships that deviated from the mononormative, heterosexist norm.

An excellent example of this fact is the Great American Classic Baby Face (1933), which was actually released the year before the Hays Code’s proper implementation in 1934. The film stars Golden Age actress Barbara Stanwyck as Lily Powers, the daughter of a speakeasy owner who engages in sex work during the Prohibition. Following her father’s death, she is encouraged by a mentor to “use” the men around her. She moves to the Big City and sleeps her way to the top of a bank called Gotham Trust Building. The original ending has Lily Powers more or less get away with this behavior. Her current partner, bank president Courtland Trenholm (George Brent), attempts suicide after she refuses to return money to him, and there is no narrative comeuppance.

Yet as the film started to get censored all over the country — alongside more general calls for the government to intervene in Hollywood’s “degeneracy” — its producer, Warner Bros., hastily reshot it so that Lily loses everything alongside her husband. There is a scene, tacked on at the end, where the bank’s board members discuss how Lily and her man have paid their debt to the bank and are now penniless.

This requirement that “degenerate” behavior (like sex work was believed to be at the time) never be validated in the narrative persisted for decades (see also Waterloo Bridge (1940), Streets of Shame (1956), Irma La Douce (1963), etc.).

Even after the Hays Code was done away with, the demonization of sex work remained a constant in film and television.

In particular, the “Disposable Sex Worker” trope — where a sex worker is killed to highlight the depravity of a specific character, environment, or event — has been the go-to for a lot of action and horror movies for over the last half a century. Whether we are talking about Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) murdering sex workers in American Psycho (2000) or Catherine (Julianne Moore) pushing the eponymous Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) out a window in the 2009 film of the same name, this trope has been criticized for framing sex workers as disposable.

This trope’s sister is the “Heart of Gold” trope, where sex workers such as Vivian (Julia Roberts) in Pretty Woman (1990) and Alina (Chloë Grace Moretz) in The Equalizer (2014) are just so nice and kind that they give money away for free and provide emotional labor for seemingly random strangers.

Both of these tropes have long been criticized as dehumanizing because they strip the character in question of three-dimensionality. The sex worker is either unneeded, as with the Disposable Sex Worker Trope, or living in the service of another. As the artist and former sex worker Andrea Werhun told the CBC about sex work’s typical depiction in media:

“We’re victims, were villains, we’re dead, we’ve got hearts of gold. These are such shallow depictions that flatten our humanity and remove nuance and complexity from who we are as human beings, as people.”

I am not going to pretend that these tropes have gone away. I was recently watching the premiere of the second season of Schmigadoon (2021–2023), and the inciting incident revolves around a burlesque dancer’s murder. It takes a long time for problematic norms to die, and we are in the middle of that process for some of these tropes, not the end.

Yet more positive ones have certainly come to the forefront in recent years as society’s empathy with sex work has started to widen, in no small part due to the work of activists who have pushed for its acceptance. The film Anora (2024) has been praised for its humanizing portrayal as acts of everyday mundaneity are shown alongside the sex work. The escort Margot Mills (Anya Taylor-Joy) in The Menu (2022) is the only person who walks away from that horror film alive after using her working-class roots to convince antagonist Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) to let her go.

It is this thread that The Perfect Couple falls into, providing us a glimpse into a sex worker who is neither disposable nor warm-and-cuddly.

The Perfect Couple

We learn that Winbury matriarch Greer (Nicole Kidman) was a sex worker during a reveal in the final episode of the season. She has had enough of the secrets and confesses:

“Your father and I didn’t meet in a gallery opening. We met in a bar…I was an escort…I had sex with men for money. My brother organized the clientele, and your father was one of those men.”

When juxtaposing the “disposable” and “heart of gold” sex worker tropes, a hierarchy often arises in these media depictions between people “working the streets” and “high-end” escorts who are believed to have closer contact with the rich and powerful and consequently in some ways redeemable. The latter women are the ones more likely to be “saved” from the profession, or so the logic of these tropes usually goes.

Yet something interesting has happened in The Perfect Couple — Greer was “saved.” She married a rich man, Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber), and leveraged that to become a successful author, but it didn’t change her dynamic in the relationship. Tag still treats her as if she were someone working for him. His family lost a lot of their wealth in what one character facetiously calls a “classic American tragedy.” Yet Tag spends his spare time taking drugs and having affairs with other women, while Greer is the one we are told rather explicitly is paying for everything.

She’s still working for the same client.

Furthermore, Tag is seemingly in control of the finances. When his son, Thomas Winbury (Jack Reynor), needs money to stave off a terrible cryptocurrency investment, he goes to Tag for a loan despite his father having no actual competency in making money. This makes the financial advice he gives Thomas when he refuses the loan — i.e., that Thomas should “know” if his investments will perform— so chilling because you can argue he’s referring to Greer. She’s the investment he knew would perform.

This control he has is confusing before the reveal, and it’s only afterward that we learn that Tag has been subtly threatening Greer throughout the entire series. The insults he throws at her, such as “colorful” and a “workhorse,” are microaggressions reminding her of her past to put so he can her in “her place.”

It’s only after she comes forward about her past that Greer can sever ties with a man who, in retrospect, was emotionally abusive, and even as it’s happening, he still can’t believe it. “It never occurred to me,” he laments as he hands over the divorce papers, “not even once, that you might actually leave me.”

Greer receives her “happy ending,” not because a man saved her but because she separated from that man.

A satisfying conclusion

We can look at The Perfect Couple as a refutation of the trope of “a sex worker being saved by a client.” While she may have financially benefited from the background the Winbury name gave her, it was far from a happily ever after. He trapped her in an emotionally abusive relationship that took her a lifetime to untangle herself from.

I have some minor nitpicks about this series. From a certain lens, framing Greer’s reveal as a sex worker as shedding her “perfect persona” can be viewed by some as condescending. I understand that it was a source of shame for her because of the abuse she experienced — abuse necessary to subvert the happily ever after trope — but some may still be unsettled by this framing, and I am not here to dissipate that tension.

Yet overall, the show feels like an okay indicator of the state of representation surrounding sex work. Over the past few years, there have been materially negative developments in the US over the legalization of sex work, so it’s nice to see that, at least onscreen, our societal outlook on it continues to shift for the better.

I’m Begging You: Stop Using Algorithmic Feeds To Get Your News

Photo by Aaron Weiss on Unsplash

It’s so easy to get lost in a media feed. Hours can go swiping through videos on TikTok, Instagram’s Reels, YouTube’s Shorts, and the many other “quick” feeds out there. “I have a problem with TikTok,” one Reddit user laments. “I’m spending upwards of 4, sometimes 5 hours a day just watching videos on TikTok.” “I have an addiction to TikTok, and the reason that I am worried about it is that it is lowering my attention span,” goes another.

These feeds are not just where we get fun distractions, but they are increasingly where we get our news. According to a Pew Research analysis released in 2024: “little more than half (54%) [of Americans] at least sometimes get news from social media.”We have gotten so accustomed to getting our information through these platforms, and yet they come with a ton of drawbacks that reduce our attention span and executive functioning, as well as make it more likely we internalize and spread misinformation.

And maybe we should all put more effort into curating our news feeds from particular sources rather than letting unaccountable algorithms do that labor for us.

The drawbacks of feeds

Most social media feeds like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and your Facebook Timeline are a sludge of misinformation where claim after claim is delivered at such a rapid pace that it becomes difficult to know if a fact is accurate at the moment, especially since this information takes advantage of human psychology to abet that spread. As scholar Kim Bisheff told Cal Poly News:

“Generally, misinformation is designed to tap into our emotional reactions: fear and anger, most frequently. We humans have this design flaw where, when we experience strong emotions — especially fear and anger — or in some cases, that feeling of validation that comes with having your opinions restated in an inflammatory way, we tend to react to that information without giving it much critical thought.”

I remember recently I saw a flood of misinformation when news of the Sean “Diddy” Combs sexual assault scandal began to circulate. A music video showed up on my feed (allegedly sung by Justin Bieber) implying he had been an SA victim of Diddy’s. The video had the lyrics: “Lost myself at a Diddy party, didn’t know that’s how it go. I was in it for a new Ferrari, but it cost me way more than my soul.”

I initially believed this claim because it was within the realm of possibility (SA in the entertainment industry is not uncommon). This information emotionally felt real to me, and that reality bypassed my ability to assess its accuracy. I started sharing the information with my partner and would have done so with more people, but on a whim, I started fact-checking it and learned that, no, this song was fake.

Justin Bieber never released the song “Lost Myself at a Diddy Party.”

Thankfully, the retraction I had to do was only with one person, but it’s not the first time something like this has happened (see Is “Occupy Democrats” Fake News?). I research on the Internet for a living, and misinformation still falls through the cracks, and it usually comes from feeds, which do not incentivize fact-checking.

With the Bieber-Diddy example, it took me five minutes to fact-check one five-second video. The average TikTok user, for example, watches almost an hour of such content every day, which could translate to a hundred or more videos a user would have to verify in a similar manner, meaning that to avoid misinformation, you properly would spend more time fact-checking feeds than consuming them.

That is too high of a hurdle to expect any user to meet. These platforms are not set up for users to pause, reflect, and deconstruct the news they absorb. You merely keep on consuming point after point, regardless of its accuracy, and that is by design.

A harmfully addictive design

There has been a consistent body of research that shows excessive screen time can have drawbacks, especially for children, most of whom now consistently use screens from infancy.

• A longitudinal study found that those exposed to television from 29 months onward (i.e., +2.4 years) saw decreased classroom engagement.

• Another noted that adolescents who used media to multitask were more likely to struggle with some aspects of executive functioning in their everyday lives. Something that is likely linked to academic performance.

• One National Institutes of Health-funded study led by Betty R. Vohr, M.D. found that six and seven-year-olds born “extremely preterm” and had more than two hours of screen time a day “were more likely to have deficits in overall IQ, executive functioning (problem-solving skills), impulse control and attention.”

• A scoping review indicates that screen time from an early age can “have negative effects on language development.”

• (Note: for this list, I used the background section for the article, Effects of Excessive Screen Time on Child Development: An Updated Review and Strategies for Management)

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that children under 18 months (1.5 years) have no screen time at all, and children from two to five limit it to one hour a day — advice that, if listened to, might mitigate some of these effects — but that’s by in large not happening. Children under one-years-old are, on average, watching almost an hour of screen time daily.

And, of course, the reason so many people, including children, are hooked to their screens — irrespective of the negative drawbacks — is because they are designed to do that. It’s well-documented at this point that tech companies have purposefully taken advantage of human psychology to manipulate our preferences (see “Persuasive Design”). Netflix even has an Emmy-winning documentary on the matter (see The Social Dilemma).

When talking about this subject, I always refer to the book Hooked by Nir Eyal, a popular read amongst the founders of Web 2.0, that laid out how companies could create products that are psychologically addictive. As Eyal writes in that book:

“Once we’re hooked, using these products does not always require an explicit call to action. Instead, they rely upon our automatic responses to feelings that precipitate the desired behavior. Products that attach to these internal triggers provide users with quick relief. Once a technology has created an association in users’ minds that the product is the solution of choice, they return on their own, no longer needing prompts from external triggers.”

This sure sounds like instructions on how to psychologically addict one’s users, and it is advice a lot of people took to heart. Most feeds are now designed to generate these internal triggers where you feel compelled to return to them again and again, unprompted.

And that’s where my concern comes from regarding using such feeds to get your news. These platforms are designed to be addicting, not accurate, which means misinformation is an integral part of the social media experience.

An unsocial conclusion

Now, I am not a scientist, so I encourage you to read up on all the information I have cited (and correct what you think is erroneous as I do make edits).

What I have read alarms me. Feeds have an element of danger to them. It doesn’t matter what the medium is. It’s impossible to verify all the claims coming at such a speed, and I think it’s a mistake to believe that an individual can overpower these hurdles through willpower alone.

None of us are immune to propaganda and misinformation.

No algorithmic feed should be your default source for news. I think the healthiest thing is to create your own RSS feed (Cory Doctorow recently evangelized about this on their blog). Gather a list of trusted sources, and when they do you wrong, drop them. While even here, there will be limitations — we cannot singularly overcome the hurdles of predatory information ecosystems — we should at least try.

Otherwise, we dictate our preferences to the whims of a feed.

‘Foundation’ Season 2 Is A Conversation About Belief and Faith

Image; Apple

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, particularly his first three books, was an anthology about a dissident scholar named Hari Seldon using an emergent theory of mathematics called psychohistory to predict the fall of the current Galactic Empire. Hari uses this foresight to establish a countermeasure, the Foundation, that will stave off the chaos of collapse and bring stability to the galaxy. The books are more or less about the first 200 years of that polity’s history as it struggles to meet this objective.

And so Apple+ had the challenge of adapting a series of short stories and novellas spanning across time, place, and characters and trying to make them into one cohesive narrative — at least if it wanted to follow the conventions of popular storytelling.

What came out of this attempt was a narrative not about science triumphing over ignorance but a battle of faith. Hari Seldon’s psychohistory is depicted in religious terms, waging a war of belief against the dogmas of the Empire and other emergent factions (note: YouTuber Just Write has an excellent breakdown of the religious themes in the first season).

The second season doubles down on this theme, and it’s better for it. We not only get better writing and direction this season but also have a more nuanced exploration surrounding faith and belief.

A conversation surrounding faith

From my perspective, the thesis for the entire season is articulated in the episode Why the Gods Made Wine. Scientism High Claric Poly Verisof (Kulvinder Ghir) is talking to Brother Constant (Isabella Laughland) about how she has more resolve in the religion than him, saying:

“I'm not sure what I’ve been clinging on to all these years is faith…When Hari Seldon walked out of the vault, I saw him with my own eyes. All of us there, we had proof. But you and your generation, you only had second or thirdhand accounts to go by. Folklore. That's the difference between belief and faith. I believed what I saw, but faith is a bigger commitment.”

It’s this tension between faith and belief that we see highlighted again and again on the show.

For example, the Empire certainly has belief in its power because its technological and military superiority allows it to do whatever it pleases. The rulers of the Empire — i.e., the three clones of Cleon I, named Dawn (Cassian Bilton), Day (Lee Pace), and Dusk (Terrence Mann), and collectively and individually referred to as Empire — are confident in their abilities because when they act, planets are bombed into oblivion, territorial borders are remade, and grand megaprojects are built.

They can see it with their eyes.

Last season, Day punished a dissident, not by killing her, but by tracking everyone she ever had contact with and then wiping them from existence (see episode The Leap). These people feel they can do whatever they want — at least to a point.

Yet its leaders don’t appear to have faith in the Empire on a spiritual level, as defined by High Claric Poly Verisof. This season, we learn that Empire (i.e., Dawn, Day, and Dusk) have all been programmed to follow a path they cannot deviate from. Cleon rather maliciously ensured that their memories were constantly being edited for compliance, and if they ever stepped out of line, a new version of them was “decanted” so that his original vision continued.

Cleon’s vision is overseen by Empire’s robotic majordomo Demerzel (Laura Birn ), who is programmed to uphold the Empire above all else. She has no control over this directive; in fact, even her emotional reality is dedicated by it. She is the definition of an object whose belief in the Empire is programmed, not cultivated.

Even the Empire’s subordinates follow more out of fear of what the Empire will do over any intrinsic good they believe it will generate. There is one General in season two named Bel Riose (Ben Daniels), and he states explicitly he’s serving Empire out of fear. He tells his lover: “The emperor’s subjects, all these trillions of people, they’re just…disposable to him. So, as the one man who isn’t, it’s my duty to protect them.”

However, as the conversation between High Claric Poly Verisof and Brother Constant highlights, the Foundation seems to have both faith and belief, and the key to the latter is that it’s rooted in a real thing. Psychohistory, at least in the context of the show, is real. The “miracles” delivered by the Foundation are nothing more than dressed-up science. As High Claric Poly Verisof preaches to Empire: “The Galactic Spirit isn’t supernatural. It’s just progress.”

One can argue that the difference between the Empire and the Foundation, and therefore the difference between belief and faith, is force. These two entities both have a longstanding vision for the future that requires intergenerational buy-in, but one requires browbeating all dissidents into compliance, and the other literally shows its math. All the people who work for the Foundation are theoretically convinced to do so through reasoning, not because of a gun that hangs over their collective heads.

It’s that distinction that, paradoxically, leads to blind faith.

A faithful conclusion

In the show, when Hari Seldon was a little boy, he mapped out the migratory patterns of a local species on his home planet with near certainty. He then walked into that herd and stood where his calculations told him he would be safe. He believed in his math and was willing to die for it—something he would ultimately do in his pursuit of psychohistory (kind of).

The math behind psychohistory is fictional, and on a meta-level, I disagree with its underlining assumptions, which is a tangent for a whole other time. Still, I do believe (pun very much intended) that material proof can lead to faith.

In many ways, this is the story of science. A layperson does not necessarily understand the math behind astrophysics or quantum mechanics, but what makes the system of science work (at least so far) is the knowledge that one could, if given enough time. The difference between you and an expert is information and nothing more, and with that can come a certainty of conviction. We currently live in a time where laypersons all over this country have “Science Is Real” signs in their front yards, committed to an ideal of science, even as the comprehension of day-to-day science is beyond them.

That’s an interesting tension being highlighted in this show. It’s so easy to view science and faith as separate entities, but whether on the world of Terminus or the Earth of here and now, sometimes they can very much intersect.

Thousands of Crickets Disrupt Anti-Trans Conference & the Long History of Buggy Activism

Photo by Ivan Ivanovič on Unsplash

On Friday, October 11, 2024, members from the UK Trans Kids Deserve Better group went to a conference hosted by the anti-trans LGB Alliance. The activists ensured that a speech by noted anti-trans activist Jamie Reed was literally met with crickets. They released thousands of crickets they were carrying on them, disrupting the conference’s speeches for the rest of the day.

The protestors were then escorted off the premises, and the LGB Alliance’s plans were not only disrupted (momentarily) but also mocked and decried in the press. “…An anti-trans “advocacy” group known as LGB Alliance reportedly had its annual conference interrupted by thousands of unexpected guests,” mocks the outlet Them. “On Friday, a group of youth activists released over 6,000 crickets,” notes Mira Lazine in LGBTQ Nation.

I wanted to highlight this and other recent buggy activism, first and foremost, because I think it’s pretty funny. There is a certain catharsis that comes with seeing hateful people, who often go about their lives facing no consequences, having to run away from insects.

Yet, I also want to focus on this event because it is a long-standing tactic that has recently picked up steam.

Crickets and other bugs

There is a rich tradition of activists using insects to mock awful people. Earlier this year, pro-Palestinian activists released bugs, such as maggots, mealworms, and crickets, on the conference room table of the Watergate Hotel, where then-Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was set to stay during his July visit to Washington, DC.

Several years ago, protestors released hundreds of Madagascar hissing cockroaches in an Albany courtroom to disrupt an arraignment hearing of tenant rights activists.

Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, Byron Burger allegedly used staffing meetings to assist in immigration sting operations. As a result, dozens of employees were deported. In protest of these deportations, activists released over ten thousand insects at one of Byron Burger’s locations.

We can go back all the way to the organizing of Black militants during the 1960s. The Albany-based group “The Brothers” once used cockroaches as a vital aspect of its campaign to protest the city’s slumlords. They dumped them on the stage of then-Mayor Erastus Corning as part of a pressure campaign for better conditions.

Bugs show up again and again in the activist scene.

This tactic has been used so often because, one, it’s cheap. Bugs are everywhere and technically free. The Brothers found cockroaches from apartment buildings and collected them in jars. Today, you don’t even have to do that type of grunt work. You can buy creepy crawlers like crickets, cockroaches, mealworms, and more on sites such as Amazon.

Bugs are also easy to transport. In that earlier example, the Albany tenant-rights protestors ferried the Madagascar hissing cockroaches in Tupperware containers with lettuce. The Trans Kids Deserve Better activists had them on their person at a conference, and I can verify when combing through the products on Amazon, that these insects arrive in small to medium-sized packaging.

It is a low-cost, low-effort action made even easier by the Internet.

Finally, releasing insects makes a statement. People in the US generally hate bugs, and they have all sorts of negative connotations, some of which tie directly into the activism these organizers are doing. The Brother’s militants in Albany collected cockroaches from rundown apartment buildings, turning them into a rather direct statement on the slums this group was protesting.

A buggy conclusion

When Trans Kids Deserve Better activists disrupted Jamie Reed’s anti-trans speech earlier this month, they were part of a long history of activists using insects to fight for social justice. Sometimes, these critters are used to protest the inhumane environments people are living in. Other times, as with this instance, they were used to mock an unjust proceeding or event.

With bugs so easy to buy online, it’s an action that is becoming increasingly easier to do. A 1000 crickets is less than $30 on the Internet right now, and with that comes one helluva a temptation.

Hey Execs, Fan Service Doesn’t (Automatically) Lead To High Returns

Image; Ubisoft

I had a thought recently while playing Star Wars: Outlaws (2024)— the open-world game developed by Massive Entertainment and published by the much-maligned Ubisoft. My player character was walking along the snowy mountaintop city of Kijimi, and she glitched into the space below the floor. She couldn’t get out, and at that moment, I thought: “How can a game this gorgeous play this badly?”

I had purchased Outlaws because I wanted to comment on it for this blog, but most gamers understandably didn’t give it that chance. The game only made one million sales in its first month. These lackluster results were hardly surprising if you were aware of the publisher’s deteriorating reputation among the gaming community and Ubisoft (at the time) deciding not to publish games on Steam, which couldn’t have helped its sales.

Yet Ubisoft seemed surprised by these results, writing in a financial statement that its sales numbers were well below expectations. It seems to me that this publisher expected that the Star Wars Intellectual Property (IP), by itself, would lead to a million-plus sales in the game’s first week, regardless of the overall playability and reception of the game.

In the current pop culture landscape, this seems to be the standard approach for a lot of media. There is this expectation that specific IP when paired with a heaping of “fan service” (i.e., crafting narratives to appease existing consumers), will guarantee a certain amount in sales.

However, in the current marketplace, where we are over-saturated with nerdy media, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Disney’s Fan Service

Let’s zoom in for a moment on Star Wars. It’s easy to see this problem not just with Outlaws but with most recent Star Wars media. These are products that rely almost exclusively on fanservice, where in some cases, such as Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan Kenobi (2022) or Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka (2023), the entire premise is built around a favorite character.

In many circumstances, these shows heavily spotlight moments that only fans of the existing media will understand. The Book Of Boba Fett (2021–2022) had entire scenes, such as Fett’s duel with Cad Bane, that would only make sense if you had watched the Clone Wars (2008–2014, 2020) cartoon. Ahsoka was effectively a sequel to the animated kid’s cartoon Rebels (2014–2018, 2020), which I saw and I still had trouble following the live-action show.

In fact, the current Creative Officer of Lucasfilm, Dave Filoni, who originally cut his creative teeth on Clone Wars, is said to be directing a movie that ties together all the disparate elements of the new Star Wars properties into one “cohesive” narrative.

That interconnectivity appears to be the content strategy for Disney’s Star Wars — and most likely the Mickey Mouse company more broadly — and I am not convinced it’s working. While these shows have generally received much attention in the zeitgeist — sometimes even critically when it comes to Andor (2022-present) and The Mandalorian (2019-present) — their overall profitability has been less certain.

A common issue I (and many others) have with streaming platforms or “steamers” is that viewership information is often not easily accessible, even to showrunners, so it’s difficult to know how much value is actually being generated — i.e., how many subscriptions these shows bring in. Reporting will claim (usually via third-party monitoring) that a show on Disney+ is highly viewed, but we have no way to confirm that.

Meanwhile, the Disney+ app — i.e., where these shows, as well as the likes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) and others, are hosted — has hardly been profitable in the long term. Disney+, and the company more broadly, was in the hole by billions just last year. The company recently had to make drastic cost-cutting measures to get back into the black, and reining in Disney+ was a massive part of that equation. As Caroline Reid wrote in Forbes in April of 2024:

“In order to pacify disgruntled stockholders, Disney had to cut $7.5 billion of costs, including a lot of the exclusive streaming content it had commissioned. Despite this, Disney+ has burned up more than $11.4 billion of operating losses since it was launched and isn’t forecast to even make a profit until the end of the year..”

There were a lot of factors that contributed to that significant loss. The COVID pandemic, for one, led to a sudden surge and drop in subscriptions across the board and a shuttering of Disney parks.

However, one of the main factors was just the arrogance of senior leadership, thinking it could supplant existing competitor Netflix if it doubled down with its existing IP and outspent them. As Caroline Reid quipped in that same Forbes article: “Disney acted like it too was in this dominant position right off the bat.”

It spent a large amount of money on exclusive streaming content without mitigating the risks that come with that spending, and then when the rug was pulled out from under it, felt the ramifications.

Beyond Disney

Yet I want to be clear that this assumption many studio executives make that specific fan-favorite IP will generate a crazy return if they only pour enough money into it is not only coming from Disney but most of the major media conglomerates.

Take the example of Sony’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024). It took in north of $200 million. This was roughly the same as its predecessor, Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021), which eeked out a little more than 2.5% times its production budget — the industry standard for whether a film flops or bombs in the box office.

However, Frozen Empire was considered a flop because the company invested significantly more money in the title (around $100 million, as opposed to $75 million), meaning it would have to make a minimum of $250 million, or $50 million more than the first title did, to be considered successful. The distributor, Sony, specifically hoped that the increased budget, coupled with fan service that integrated the sequel with the older Ghostbusters IP, such as actors from the original film, would generate this return. In the words of Ryan Scott in Slash Film: “[Frozen Empire] was bigger and featured more nostalgic imagery to try and hook audiences.”

Yet those nostalgia hooks did not generate higher returns because that strategy does not work in our current media landscape. I would not use that assumption to greenlight an increased budget for a sequel or spinoff.

Warner Brothers' film Joker: Folie à Deux is another example of this. The original Joker, with a budget of around $55 million, was a runaway hit in 2019, meeting a worldwide box office return of over $1 billion. From a financial standpoint, it makes sense that a company would see that overwhelming return on investment and try to replicate that lightning-in-the-bottle success.

However, there was no game plan for the sequel. Director Todd Phillips had pitched Joker as a standalone story. So you had this very obvious problem of a series that earned acclaim for its story (it won two Oscars) struggling to deliver on its core selling point. To me, that kind of hurdle would justify a conservative budget. I might bump it to $65 million and push Phillips to focus more on the story. Instead, the studio gave the film a budget of $200 million, requiring it to make a minimum of $500 million to be considered a “success.”

Why would you make such a gamble when the whole point of the original’s success was that it was cheap to make?

And yet, that appears to be the strategy. Many media executives seem to be working on the assumption that a well-known IP, factored in with a consistent amount of fan service, will generate a guaranteed amount in returns, but if that strategy ever worked, it doesn’t now.

We have reached a point in the media ecosystem where so many existing properties are being retold and rebooted that it is difficult to imagine a nerdy IP just having automatic success in the box office or streaming landscape.

A cinematic conclusion

In general, when I complain about media being narratively bad, I often hear the argument that capitalism isn’t driven by art for art’s sake. “It’s important,” such critics say, “that these products make money first and foremost.”

If this analysis has shown anything, however, it’s that the people treating “art as a business” aren’t even good at it on those terms. Many firms appear to be overspending on popular IP to compete in a crowded marketplace, leading to a roulette wheel-like attitude regarding spending. They are betting all-in on a particular IP because they think it has a built-in type of financial return, and that’s faulty reasoning. The financial success of a piece of “content” has much more to do with marketing, narrative cohesion, and an intersection of other factors than just the popularity of a particular IP.

Sometimes, those are theoretically within a firm’s control and can be mitigated for (or not). For example, I loved the indie horror comedy Lisa Frankenstein (2024), but it did horribly despite its high audience favorables. Its failure has much more to do with its scaled-down marketing budget, critics hating it, its Superbowl Sunday weekend release date, and its limited theater release overall. It’s possible to overcome such hurdles through better scheduling and marketing, but there were probably other projects that Focus Features thought were worthier of its budget, making Lisa Frankenstein more of a calculated failure. Focus Features lost $2-3 million on the picture, which is small in movie terms.

Other times, though, success is not even in a firm’s control. The recent box office bomb Furiosa (2024) was well received by critics and audiences alike but only took in $173 million worldwide despite needing to earn over $400 million to be considered a success. The reasons for its failure have more to do with general consumer trends than anything specific about the film itself. As Jonathan H. Kantor speculates in Looper:

“Furiosa” flat-out bombed at the box office, possibly due to the recasting of the lead, the often poor performance of prequels, or the near decade that passed between the release of “Fury Road” and “Furiosa.”

The passage of time and widespread consumer conceptions about prequels are two factors that, from a marketing perspective, take a lot of work to control. And even then, sometimes, your audience still doesn’t see your film. It’s baffling that firms spend so much on these individual investments when the odds of success are approaching a flip of the coin.

Is that what good investing is?

I know many media executives have crafted formulas that predict that X IP with Y fan integration will generate Z revenue, but these formulas are nothing more than highly elaborate vibes. Studios would not be so easily overspending on projects if they had cracked the code on consumer preferences.

Human consumption is far less predictable than that — at least, this fan seems to think so.

Divorce Saves Lives (Men’s Most of All)

Photo by Anton Darius on Unsplash

“One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace … is the idea that, like, ‘Well, okay, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term.’”

- JD Vance, 2021

For a long time, women who could marry had little agency within this institution. Our identities were, legally speaking, merged with our husbands, who had the ability to make financial decisions in exchange for the theoretical obligation to protect us (see coverture law). A married woman had no right to manage her assets and property, and, depending on the time period and her citizenship status, there were vast limitations on earning a wage.

No-fault divorce (i.e. being able to end a marriage without having to prove that one party did anything wrong) did not start to get implemented until the 1960s. The women who had the economic privilege to push for a divorce before this time had to legally prove that their husbands were committing adultery, being abusive, or some other legal offense. This requirement was a hurdle that was both traumatizing and difficult to do, in effect barring many women from being able to separate legally.

Some may think that all my fellow women and femmes accepted that state of affairs. Oppressors always want to believe that their victims simply accept unjust hierarchies as passive objects, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Oppression can turn one into a being of vengeance, where the oppressed seek to make those who hurt them suffer.

In fact, one of the time-honored pastimes of women trapped in terrible marriages is simply to kill their husbands.

Women killing their husbands

The murder of terrible husbands is nothing new. There is a stereotype that poison is a woman’s weapon, one ridiculed as weak and cowardly. And while I think that is a mischaracterization — planning a murder of someone who has more power than you in society is incredibly gutsy — it’s a stereotype that has roots in truth.

Many women did use poison.

Take the almost mythical poison Aqua Tofana, which was allegedly used in 17th-century Italy to kill men. It was associated with an underground professional poisoner, Guilia Tofana, who sold the poison to dissatisfied women, contributing to the deaths of hundreds of men in the process (note: Margaret Killjoy has a fantastic podcast summarizing her efforts).

The actual Aqua Tofana concoction is believed to be either arsenic, lead, belladonna, or some combination. It was sold in a cosmetic bottle that could be easily disguised as part of a woman’s toiletries. It was allegedly orderless and tasteless, so women could slip it into their husband or male guardian’s food or drink and then pass off the ensuing symptoms as an unrelated illness of the time.

Arsenic, in particular, was used throughout Europe in the 19th century because it was widely accessible and cheap. In Britain, it was found in everything from wallpaper to rat poison. As Dr. James C. Whorton said in an interview with the History News Network: “…[arsenic] was democratized. Everybody could afford it and there was no control of the sale of it.”

This greater accessibility meant that murders with arsenic unsurprisingly increased. And since women under patriarchy do not have the same entitlements to violence as men, such poisonings became linked in the popular imagination with women. High-profile poisoning cases, such as that of alleged murderer Sarah Chesham, were sensationalized in the press, even though the majority of spousal homicides were still caused by men. As Dr. Whorton continues in that interview:

“Once it became evident that arsenic poisoning was increasing in the 1840s and there were cases of women being arrested and convicted, there was a hysterical overreaction and fear that virtually every woman in the country [of Britain] was trying to find a way to knock off her husband or kids.”

This fear of women using arsenic to murder their husbands, male guardians, and children was such a concern that in 1851, the House of Lords attempted to amend the Sale of Arsenic Regulation Act so that it would forbid women from being able to purchase it legally.

While the Arsenic Scare of the 19th century would die down due to a variety of factors (i.e., better detection, new moral panics emerging, and the rights of women improving, etc.), these old reasons for murder have not gone away. Whether we are talking about Yvonne Godwin, slipping rat poison into her abusive husband’s cake in 2008, or Rebecca Payne slipping sleeping pills into her husband’s favorite cookies in 2023, women still try to kill their husbands because the legal right to divorce does not prevent (some) women from being trapped in abusive and financially restrictive relationships.

Women strike back at their husbands all the time, and the nature of poisonings makes it challenging to know the full scope of these events. Many poisons are slow-acting and difficult to detect without knowing what to test for, and since the law tends to strictly punish women who kill their abusers, there is not exactly an incentive to come clean about it.

You kill your abuser and then let the world think he died of a heart attack, a stroke, or some other natural misfortune.

A deadly conclusion

Now, I don’t want to make it seem like all women killers across history are saints. Women, like men, are people, and some of us can suck. Just this year, Kouri Richins stood trial for allegedly poisoning her husband and then using his death to write a children’s book about processing her grief.

Historically, not all the women who used Aqua Tofana and arsenic were doing so for benign reasons. Some wanted to get an inheritance or estate, and due to the paternalistic nature of the legal system, a man was standing in the way. Others didn’t want the responsibility of motherhood (maybe never did), and so they saw no alternative but to murder their entire family — their children included.

The goal isn’t to say that women are all angels but rather to matter-of-factly point out what inevitably happens when you make divorce harder to do than murder: men get killed.

There has been a lot of talk recently about repealing no-fault divorce. And I look at the men arguing for this fate and wonder if they are aware of the horrors in front of them. Women are not passive objects that will accept the stripping away of our rights. With the right prompting, we can be vengeful ghosts — bent on destroying those in our way.

The men looking to test that wraith should be very afraid.

Let’s Talk About the ‘Uglies’ Messy Trans Subtext

Image; Davis Entertainment, Anonymous Content, Industry Entertainment, Wonderland Sound and Vision, Netflix

The Uglies is the first book in a dystopian young adult series about a society governed by strict beauty norms. I came to it as an adult, which might surprise you since it’s geared toward teenage girls. I picked up my copy of Uglies in 2015 and tore through all four of its main books, and controversially liked Extras the best.

I bring this all up not to brag but to tell you that, from the perspective of a reader, I am familiar with this series. I was excited about Uglies coming to Netflix. And I was equally excited when trans actress Laverne Cox was cast as the villainous Dr. Cable, the antagonist of the series holding up this society’s dystopian beauty norms.

I am going to be doing a trans reading of this film because, well, I want to, and also, I think Cox’s casting adds something interesting to a film whose plotline is about children getting surgeries to conform to societal beauty norms— a theme that is pretty messy.

Trans beauty

For those who don’t know, Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series takes place in a post-fossil-fuel and post-capitalist world where our current civilization has fallen due to our society’s unsustainability finally catching up with us. A virus destroyed all of our fossil fuel, most of our tech stopped working, and we are now referred to as the Rusties after all of our rusting and rotting shit.

In the place of this dysfunction, a new society has emerged — a collection of city-states that have tried to remove all divisions between people by making everyone pretty. As the narrator, who is also our lead, monologues in the beginning:

People’s differences continued to create classes, clans, and countries, which prevented them from their shared humanity.

So, they came up with a radical solution: the transformation. Everyone, on their 16th birthday, undergoes a life-changing operation to become their most perfect self. And when everyone is perfect, conflict melts away. Everyone is healthy, happy, Pretty.

Almost everyone gets surgery at 16 by a set of trained doctors to make them “scientifically” pretty, and it’s here we meet our protagonist, Tally Youngblood (Joey King), a titular “ugly,” who is on the verge of her sixteenth birthday.

If you are very clever, you’ll have noticed right away that by creating a split between “pretties” and “uglies,” this society, like so many before it, has created a caste system. Instead of being divided by wealth, its leaders rule through a combination of physical traits and what role they happen to possess in society — with doctors on the Committee for Morphological Standards being on top.

And who maintains this dystopian, shame-ridden society guided by the principles of eugenics?

Well, it’s Laverne Cox’s Dr. Cable, of course. We first meet her in a stunning dress, monologuing to Tally’s class via giant hologram about the importance of getting the pretty surgery:

For those of you turning 16 today, you are truly on the cusp of a metamorphosis. That change starts with one elegant procedure that will make you perfect, both inside and out. You’ll be beautiful and free from hatred and discrimination based on the way that you look.

And, like, to me, these words can be interpreted as a pretty on-the-nose metaphor for transitioning. There is a big goal for some — though certainly not all trans people — to “pass.” For you to undergo such a transformation that society cannot tell the difference between you and a person that has a gender that matches their assigned sex at birth.

If only I get this right set of elective procedures, the logic goes, then I’ll be a “real” man or woman or what have you, and as Cable says, you’ll “be free from […] discrimination based on the way that you look.”

As the film progresses, we learn that Dr. Cable does not tolerate dissent: she forces Tally on a quest to find a mysterious sanctuary called “The Smoke,” which is filled with runaways who do not want the operation. She is quite literally a trans person hunting down children so they forcibly undergo elective surgeries.

There is a chilling scene where Dr. Cable, due to Tally’s unwitting help, finds The Smoke, and she brags about forcing a bunch of children and adults to get elective surgeries. “In fact, all of your procedures have been scheduled,” she maliciously cackles to a crowd of horrified onlookers.

It’s a comment that struck me because I (a trans person) am painfully aware that that is how a lot of conservatives see transgender people currently — villains who are forcing people, mainly children, to transition into something they “don’t want.” As Trump erroneously said this year: “Can you imagine your child goes to school and they don’t even call you, and they change the sex of your child?”

The trans subtext in this film is messy, and it’s further complicated by how this film conveys rural-urban relations.

The environment & shit

In the books, the city-states are 100% totalitarian. Residents are constantly monitored, scary hovercrafts monitor the perimeter, and their schools are using indoctrination to pressure children into having a surgery that we learn later in the book (and movie) will impair them cognitively.

Yet, importantly, they are not lying about the city’s environmentalism in the books. Their governments seem to care deeply about sustainability, so much so that many of the luxuries of the pretty part of town are biodegradable. The Smoke is seen as a threat partially for its potential impact on the environment, as it will encourage people to move outside of cities (and for populations to expand).

The best example of this concern has to do with the White Tiger Orchid. It’s a product of Rusty society in the books. A plant whose growth was bioengineered to be so effective that it’s now invasively taking over the surrounding landscape, leeching so many nutrients out of the soil that it desertifies everything it touches.

In the books, Tally meets a group of city-run rangers who are eternally charged with the task of control-burning the periphery of the Orchid’s range so they do not take over the world. As one ranger tells Tally in the books:

About three hundred years ago, some Rusty figured a way to engineer the species to adapt to wider conditions. She messed with the genes to make them propagate more easily….One of the most beautiful plants in the world. But too successful. They turned into the ultimate weed. What we call a monoculture. They crowd out every other species.

…the orchids eventually die out, victims of their own success, leaving a wasteland behind. Biological zero. We rangers try to keep them from spreading. We’ve tried poison, engineered diseases, predators…but fire is the only thing that really works.

In the movies, however, the city’s environmentalism is a lie.

The flowers were engineered as an unsustainable energy source, with desertification being a planned feature of this plant to keep dissidents inside the cities. As the Smoke native David (Keith Powers) lectures:

Those orchids are toxic. They pull all the nutrients from the soil
and destroy everything in their path…Those flowers are turning the planet
into a wasteland. Killing everything. Forcing everyone to live in the city.

This sets up an interesting dichotomy between the totalitarian, urban landscapes of the cities and the more egalitarian, environmental community of the Smoke. As David monologues in another scene: “The city is not going to stop. Because The Smoke is a threat to everything they stand for… Where we believe in preserving what’s natural, they believe in manipulation.”

When you pair this anti-urban outlook, which in a US context is traditionally associated with conservatism, and you add it to everything else we have been discussing, it can leave an awkward taste in your mouth. The evil city dwellers are trying to force children to have surgeries, and they are destroying rural safe havens to do so.

It’s just a weird subtext to process in 2024 America.

An ugly conclusion

I want to emphasize that I don’t think this film actively endorses this subtext. There was no attempt by director Joseph McGinty Nichol to make an anti-trans movie, especially considering the casting of Laverne Cox as the villain, which I think was a bold and commendable choice. It’s more of a problem of this film just playing things so safe (i.e., conservatively) that its message ends up being dull enough for you to project any subtext onto it that you wish.

The film doesn’t bother to speak about LGBT identity one way or another. We do not see queer representation in Pretty Town or The Smoke, which would have definitely sharpened what it was trying to say here. The narrative also softens its perspective on things such as race. The books had everyone who underwent the surgery adopt a standardized olive skin tone. While in the film, the evil standard of pretty is quite inclusive, racially and ethnically speaking.

And that’s a shame because I see what this film could have been. There could have been something exciting said about how beauty norms often coincide with white supremacist, cisgendered, and heteronormative values that this film just sidesteps.

In the end, it ends up saying even less than the 2005 book version did, and that conservatism leaves an ugly taste in my mouth.

People Telling You, “It Was Different Back Then” Are Not Talking About the Past

Image; Photo by Ron Dauphin on Unsplash

There’s a familiar rebuttal that happens whenever talking about the problematic attitudes of the past: “Things were different then. We all know it wasn’t right, and didn’t agree with it, but we need to move on to a better future.” (note: that’s a word-for-word comment from an article about Songs of the South).

Proponents of this mindset argue that we need to recognize that the values of the past were different from today, and therefore, we shouldn’t judge such people by more modern standards.

We can talk in circles about the accuracy of this statement — and we will — and yet I also want to focus on how these counters are not really about the past at all. I assert that many of these people are using such statements as deflections to reinforce the unfairness of the status quo.

Let’s talk about the people back then

The conversation over the “things were different back then” debate usually begins and ends with its veracity. People will argue this point, and then you will engage in the long and drawn-out process of pointing out the various points in history where people didn’t align with the dominant hierarchy’s beliefs.

My favorite example of this is the debate about slavery in ancient Greece. The historical record is pretty consistent that slavery was ubiquitous across the Greek city-states. This does not mean that slavery was accepted everywhere in the world. Even the nearby Achaemenid Empire, aka the Persian Empire, had banned some (though not all instances) of it. Still, it is true that whether traveling to the democratic Athens or the authoritarian Sparta, enslaved people were a common sight.

We don’t have much evidence in the surviving record that there were many anti-slavery victories during this time — i.e., the number of slave revolts during Greek antiquity we have proof of are few and far between— but we do have evidence that some people were definitely against slavery. And we know this because a famous conservative wrote against the anti-slavery viewpoint. You may have heard of him. His name was Aristotle. As he laments in his work Politics:

“For some thinkers hold the function of the master to be a definite science, and moreover think that household management, mastership, statesmanship and monarchy are the same thing…

…others however maintain that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them by nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force.”

That latter point sounds like the modern position on slavery, only spoken about thousands of years ago.

Ironically, our most substantial evidence for anti-slavery sentiment in Ancient Greece is Aristotle’s passing efforts to discredit it. We might not even have this much evidence if this work had not survived the ravages of time. It’s hard to ascertain the scope of these activities, and we might never know for sure.

People will argue that such uncertainty proves that these viewpoints were the minority, and you can certainly assert that, but it also proves that despite an overwhelmingly hostile environment where scholars were claiming that slavery was a “science,” some people could see through their indoctrination and resist it. There were those who hated slavery and shockingly (or not so shockingly if you have any understanding of history) appeared to have had “modern” sensibilities “back then.”

In fact, history is littered with counterexamples of people who have surprisingly contemporary values and then do something about it, such as John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Huey P. Newton’s founding and organizing with the Black Panthers, or the radical “terrorism” of British suffragettes such as Christabel Pankhurst.

People resist bad things all the time, even when they are unpopular, even when they are killed for doing so.

The “things were different back then” line ignores these contributions and asks us to retell a monolithic version of history that lacks such nuances — one where history’s messy complications don’t have to be wrestled with. And left unstated, where we only focus on the “winners” of history and never its dissidents.

And to me, that viewpoint says more about how people want us to treat the present than the past.

It’s about the present, too

This argument being applied to the past (e.g., that things were different back then) is a roundabout way of saying that we shouldn’t judge a status quo by our own ethics, and it’s a criticism that applies to the present as well.

If people are merely a product of their supremacist conditioning, then they do not need to be held accountable for the bad things that they do. They are simply doing the behaviors that they were taught to do.

It is what it is.

We also have injustices that many of us are trained from an early age to accept (or, at the very least, tolerate). Our supply chains rely on the violent exploitation of the Global South. From the horrifying extraction of cobalt in the Congo to the “sweatshops” assembling the “stuff” of modern-day economies, slavery and other forms of worker exploitation are a surprisingly common occurrence in our society.

And yet, we largely do not hold the people responsible for these conditions to account. Companies such as Apple and Tesla (which rely on materials such as cobalt for their many battery-driven products) are purchasing labor from firms that then contract other firms that use slavery, and there is no accountability there.

Just this year, a US Court of Appeals ruled that this degree of separation was enough to ensure that large tech companies were not legally liable for these abuses. As the court judges ruled:

“…there is no shared enterprise between the Companies and the suppliers who facilitate forced labor. The Tech Companies own no interest in their suppliers. Nor do the Tech Companies share in the suppliers’ profits and risks. Although a formal business relationship is not necessary to be a participant in a venture, something more than engaging in an ordinary buyer-seller transaction is required to establish “participation” in an unlawful venture.”

The logic here is that the “traditional” buyer-seller relationship is outside the scope of such scrutiny.

Companies like Apple may benefit from slavery, but they cannot be held responsible for it because they are not directly facilitating that enterprise. Apple merely profits from the materials enslaved people mine. Apple only established such a significant demand for said materials that it will ensure their continued mining by enslaved persons in the future.

The logic of the marketplace allows that kind of behavior because those are the values of our time, and if your ethics disagree with that — well, tough shit.

A different conclusion

I don’t believe the future will look kindly on this market-based reasoning for allowing slavery in the twenty-first century any more than we think that the philosophies of Greek antiquity successfully justified it back then. It sure will make those doing awful things feel better about the atrocities they are committing in the moment, though.

“It was different back then” is an argument that is more about assuaging the moral righteousness of those living in the here and now than it really is about the past.

Aristotle is dead. The slave traffickers of ancient Greece are all dead. It’s of no consequence to those corpses whether we speak ill of them or not. But for the people who do the same shit as them — those profiting from the exploitation of their fellow humans — they care how we talk about those who commit awful deeds.

They care because such talk would allow for calls for accountability, restitution, and redistribution. If people are responsible for the bad things they do in the moment. If your conditioning is not a justification for them but merely a pretext, then the wealth and privileges accrued from doing those bad things can and should be taken away.

And that conclusion has profound implications for how we structure our society: not just in the past but in the present.

Alien Romulus Explains Why Corporate Solutions Often Lack Sense

Image; 20th Century Studios

Fede Álvarez’s latest outing, Alien Romulus (2024), falls somewhere between a prequel and a sequel. Set in between Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), it tells the story of indentured servant Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) who goes on an off-book scavenging mission with some peers to get the parts necessary to flee her corporate colony (and effective prison).

On the titular Romulus station, she runs across the alien we have all come to know and love (from afar) — the shiny, black-tailed alien sometimes referred to as a xenomorph. It starts picking off Rain’s crew one by one as she enters a race for survival against a creature her captor, Weyland-Yutani, will do anything to acquire.

There has been a lot of discussion about this movie, particularly its usage of AI, animatronics, and a reference performance to recreate the dead actor Ian Holm, which some critics believed was exploitative.

We will sidestep that conversation and instead focus on what this text says about corporate solutions — mainly that they would rather risk tearing everything down than threatening the status quo.

Hell is made in a corporate boardroom

Life on Jackson’s Star, the Weyland-Yutani corporate colony our protagonist Rain has been stranded on since childhood, is hell. The sky is perpetually dark, crime appears rampant, and all the workers are surrounded by heavy industry with no apparent attempts to mitigate it. We see our lead walk past noxious fumes being burned up in some industrial process, and no one bats an eye.

Rain, we learn, is never leaving this planet “legitimately.” Early on, she attempts to buy a ticket off-world as she has met her corporate-assigned quota — one that took her years to fulfill — and should be free to go now, but the Weyland-Yutani bureaucracy has no interest in letting that happen.

We see a chilling scene where the administrative assistant at the travel office extends the number of days she owes to the company by years. “Unfortunately,” the assistant says with faux concern, “the quotas have been raised to 24,000 hours, so you will be released from contract in another five to six years.”

I understand why Rain goes on a deadly scavenging mission to escape Jackson’s Star — I probably would, too.

The logic I have trouble understanding, or more like stomaching, is that of this corporation’s solution. Weyland-Yutani also understands that life in its colonies is suboptimal, if only for the reduced lifespan of its workers. As the android Andy (David Jonsson), whose primary directive at this time is to aid the company, laments to his companions:

“Our colonies are dying: Unbearable temperatures, Novel diseases every cycle, and toxic mine fumes. It’s all one unforeseen tragedy after another.”

This framing, though, is a lie. It’s not all one “unforeseen” tragedy after another. Weyland-Yutani placed inhabitants, through coercion and force, into those terrible conditions. It enslaved people and then did not provide them with the resources they needed to survive long-term, only a marginal amount capable of yielding a profit.

Weyland-Yutani’s negligence is the reason why its workers are dying in the first place.

The company’s solution is not to improve its worker’s environments — environments it has built and therefore is responsible for— but to use the “perfect” DNA of the Xenomorph to make humans more “adaptable.” As the Android Rook (Daniel Betts) — the character that is the source of the Ian Holms controversy — monologues:

“Mankind was never truly suited for space colonization. They are simply too fragile. They are too weak. The work of this station aimed to change that. The perfect organism — that’s how we should refer to human beings…So I took [the xenomorphs] gift…This is a much needed and overdue upgrade for humanity.”

The only problem with implementing this plan is that the creepy crawling Xenomorph is “just so darn” destructive. It has destroyed every facility it’s been studied in, including the abandoned facilities of Romulus and Remes, where our protagonist Rain just so happens to be scavenging in.

There is no doubt what it would do if it ever were able to land on a more populated area (see Aliens), and early trials of a xenomorph-human hybrid are terrifying. Late into the movie, the viewer is shown an example of one — a flesh-pink-shaped xenomorph with a disturbing face that peaks into the uncanny valley. It’s so far removed from its humanity that it drains its mother dry.

This is a bad plan — and the movie does not pretend otherwise (Weyland-Yutani’s android Rook is a secondary antagonist) — but it is one rooted in economic incentives, we understand. If the company can get this plan to work — and that’s a big if — Weyland-Yutani can solve its problems by sacrificing none of its power.

And that doesn’t feel very far removed from the economic incentives of our present reality at all.

A metaphor for our climate

There is something oddly prescient about this movie’s critique of a corporation engaging in a self-destructive solution rather than letting go of control.

I am going to go on a bit of a tangent, but I promise it will connect back to the movie Alien: Romulus. You can argue that this movie is making a rather direct metaphor about our current environmental crisis. We likewise exist at a time when economic incentives have degraded our environment, and it’s not something that just happened but is the result of negligence from corporate and governmental actors.

Similar to Weyland-Yutani’s gene-editing plan, the answers constantly marketed to us to solve the climate crisis are either a continuation of the problem (see “natural gas,” i.e., methane) or are so far removed from reality that they could be catastrophic if ever actually implemented en masse.

Perhaps the most alarming example of the latter is geoengineering or the large-scale manipulation of Earth’s environment. Geoengineering is controversial, to say the least, and it’s hardly a thought exercise. It’s in many ways something we as a species already have a lot of experience with, as we are currently running a giant, catastrophic geoengineering experiment that we informally call climate change.

For some, this ubiquity makes it the desired solution to fight climate change — to fight fire with fire. Experiments are being run, and companies are being founded based on the premise that we will soon be able to “hack” the Earth into compliance. The start-up Make Sunsets, for example, has raised millions to release balloons with aerosols into the atmosphere to alter the climate.

The ball on this is very much rolling.

If you can’t tell, I am firmly in the “anti-geoengineering Earth to fight climate change” camp — though not against researching it on a small scale.

If the climate crisis has taught us anything, it’s that our planet’s climate is such a complicated system that we cannot possibly model it with certainty. We must assume that any significant change will have unintended knock-on effects that can spiral out of control. As Renée Cho summarizes the standard objections to Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a subset of solar geoengineering, in an article in Columbia’s Climate School magazine:

“Those against advancing SAI research are worried about its potential and uncertain impacts on the climate and ecosystems that modeling has revealed. Studies show that SAI could weaken the stratospheric ozone layer, alter precipitation patterns and affect agriculture, ecosystem services, marine life and air quality. Moreover, the impacts and risks would vary by how and where it is deployed, the climate, ecosystems and the population. Apart from deployment variations, small changes in other variables, such as the size of the aerosol droplets, their chemical reactivity and the speed of their reactions with ozone can also produce different results.”

While there are many different types of geoengineering, not just SAI — e.g., Marine cloud brightening, Cirrus cloud thinning, Sunshades, etc. — the fundamental problem is the same: there are a lot of variables that are difficult to account for at such a large scale when the more straightforward (and less risky answer) would be to implement the technology and social tools we do have now to reduce our emissions.

To me, geoengineering has the same ideological roots as Weyland-Yutani’s Xenomorph gene-editing solution to space colonization. They are both solutions that do not attempt to solve systemic problems — i.e., the financial incentives that allow companies to degrade the environment (and hurt the people) around them.

Instead, they are ultimately rooted in a type of wish fulfillment, the idea that everything can continue more or less the same with one or two tweaks.

A horrifying conclusion

Alien: Romulus recontextualizes why Weyland-Yutani wants the Xenomorph so badly in a way that resonates with many modern-day viewers. It’s not merely seen as a weapon anymore — we are past the Cold War metaphors of the 70s and 80s — but also as a cost-saving measure.

A method for Weyland-Yutani to “solve” its environmental problems while not deviating from corporate imagination.

That is a sound critique of modern-day corporate America — a series of institutions that would rather a plan be projected to turn a profit than for it actually to work. For people to propose solutions that do not ask capitalists to reduce profits (or lose power) and, hopefully, cut those pesky labor costs.

Whether on Earth or in the void of space, it’s a logic that currently seems inescapable — and I am glad to see it scrutinized on the Silver Screen.

The Appropriation of ‘Queerbaiting’: Where Do We Go From Here?

Image; Bridget Laudien

The discourse around “queerbaiting” (i.e., whether a work is using a queer “aesthetic” to attract queer fans without ever intending to validate such identities ) has been going through a bit of a moment over the past couple of years. If you go online, you will see many commentators telling their viewers or readers that the usage of this term has gone too far.

“The Problem With the Internet’s Obsession With Queerbaiting,” goes the title of a Them article by James Factora.

“Taking media out of context is in bad ‘taste,’” argues the Lanthorn Editorial Board.

There is a building consensus among social critics that we shouldn’t use this phrase anymore, and I wanted to talk about how we have arrived at this point and what it means for our language more broadly.

A brief queer history

Traditionally, queerbaiting has been a marketing tactic. It had to do with the creators and marketers of a text providing cues that are familiar to queer viewers but can be missed by everyone else.

A classic example is Teen Wolf characters Derek Hale (Tyler Hoechlin) and Stiles Stilinski (Dylan O’Brien), who had a “frenemies” dynamic that was read by many fans as homoerotic. As I write in a past piece:

“This tension was something that the marketing team of the series definitely leaned into. In one promo for the Teen Choice Awards, Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien are on a boat, seductively wrapped around each other. ‘We are on a ship, pun intended,’ Dylan O’Brien says, referencing the fan culture word shipping, which is about fans pairing two characters together romantically.”

It may seem silly now, but people were genuinely mad at this (see Jaquelin Elliott’s essay Becoming The Monster: Queer Monstrosity and the Reclamation of the Werewolf in Slash Fandom for more details).

Queerbaiting, it’s important to remember, came during a context before the normalization of queer representation in media. In the 90s and 2000s, it was still rare to see queer characters on screen. Advocacy groups spent a lot of time unpacking the lack of LGBTQIA+ representation, with the nonprofit GLAAD tracking representation in television since 1996.

As this discourse navigated to online fandom communities in the 2010s, there was a heated debate on when mainstream properties such as Disney would introduce their “first” queer character.

It was noted by many that the company was not afraid to use queerbaiting in its marketing, releasing promotional material about upcoming queer representation, only for said representation to be small and easily edited out of foreign releases (see LeFou in the Beauty And The Beast reboot, Oaken from Frozen, etc.)

That was the conversation for years.

Yet things have improved (at least regarding representation), partly because that advocacy worked and society changed. There is an increase in queer representation in media — for some demographics.

Disney has many queer characters now (Ethan Clade in Strange World, Greg from the short Out, Phastos from Eternals, etc.). Some of the most popular shows on Netflix are packed with LGBTQ+ characters (e.g., Sex Education, Kaos, Heartstoppers, etc.). The latest Star Wars game, Outlaws, has an entire subplot where you can rescue a man’s boyfriend.

That “first” boundary has been crossed so often that it’s no longer noteworthy.

The urgency for queerbaiting has dissipated because, for some queer fans — especially more privileged, whiter, more male ones — you can just let the marketplace decide now. If Disney or whoever doesn’t want queer characters, you can go to the hundreds of alternatives that are out there. The term, therefore, has little utility (for some).

And in the meantime, it has been appropriated to let people online actually do a lot of harm to queer and non-queer creators alike.

The appropriation of the term

Again, originally queerbaiting was about the content of the media being discussed and how that content was then marketed. The Teen Wolf example was less about whether actors Tyler Hoechlin and Dylan O’Brien were gay in real life and more about how their characters were being sold to the fandom of the show.

However, parallel to the debates for representation, in the 2010s was also an effort to make sure that queer actors actually played queer characters. It was not uncommon to see debates over whether it was appropriate for straight actors to star in such roles.

This was done in response to the fact that straight and cisgendered actors often played the few queer roles that existed at the time, as Tom Hanks famously did in his role as a gay lawyer in Philadelphia or Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Dont Cry. Some in the community were upset that those facing systemic discrimination for being openly queer were denied such roles, while non-queer actors were receiving accolades for pretending to be such identities.

Over time, such allegations were lumped in with the term queerbaiting. As a pejorative, it came to describe people “pretending” to be queer for fame and attention.

An early example often cited is the Russian duo t.A.T.u. and their 2002 sapphic song All The Things She Said, which drew heavily on a star-crossed lovers schtick. We have since learned that this same-sex branding was a marketing gimmick by their producer, Ivan Shapovalov.

Yet queerbaiting has been thrown around to describe celebrities from Nick Jonas to James Franco, who have had multiple pieces speculating on their sexualities. As S.E. Smith writes, inappropriately, in my opinion, of James Franco in the Daily Dot:

“Franco has trafficked on this kind of ambiguity throughout his career — both in his personal and professional life. He wants people to ask these questions and wants to be targeted directly with them so he can be evasive in interviews…His work straddles that sweet divide of possibly maybe being queer enough to be embraced by the queer community (and lauded by “progressive” straights), but not being so queer as to offend the homophobes. He dangles the prize in front of his followers, and they’re left forever chasing the brass ring, not realizing that he’s made his actual sexuality almost beside the point.”

We are seeing real-life people now being called out for “acting gay” or “trans” under the banner of queerbaiting. Arguably the term has now been weaponized to justify real-life harassment and outing campaigns for actors that garner a queer “aesthetic” (whatever the hell that means) or even play queer characters without being “out.”

An infamous example happened to Kit Connor, who played Nick Nelson in Heartstoppers (2022-present), despite the text being decidedly queer. Kit Connor reported being harassed online for his alleged “queerbaiting” and ultimately felt forced to come out as bisexual, tweeting: “I’m bi, congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye.”

Some have argued that because of this appropriation, the term is not useful anymore. As Sarah Z argues in I Was Wrong About Queerbaiting:

“The more I think about the concept of queerbaiting, the more I genuinely think we should just retire it…When we’ve reached the point that the term has come to encapsulate 500 things — real people being closeted, real people being bisexual, censored gay relationships in TV, ships people like that aren’t canon, the actual use of queerness as a marketing tactic with the intent to deceive a queer audience, etc. — I think the term has ceased to be useful.”

It’s similar to the argument that happens whenever any word is appropriated. Woke was originally a word Black people used for being aware of systemic racism and other injustices and has since come to be appropriated by conservatives to mean anything they don’t like.

The same thing happened with triggered, where trolls tried to rebrand “trigger warnings” as leftist nonsense. Whenever a reactionary force captures a word — and those arguing that everyone must publicly identify as queer are doing so for attention can be labeled as such — there is this tendency to want to abandon the word altogether.

Bad people are using it to say bad things — ergo, it’s gross.

And that’s where we are with the word queerbaiting — do we try to preserve the original meaning, or do we let this discourse go?

A baiting conclusion

Language, of course, evolves, and if queerbaiting exclusively becomes about forming “investigations” into whether someone is “actually” queer or not, then I have little interest in that iteration of the term.

People should be allowed to be open about their sexual orientations and gender identities as much or as little as they wish. Straight people should be able to kiss the same sex without it “meaning” anything. Cisgender men should be allowed to wear dresses and still be cis.

Yet, shying away from such terms just because the conversations around them get messy is something I am wary about. As terms become more popular, they inevitably get appropriated. We can see the same thing with a lot of therapy-speak, such as “gaslighting,” “lovebombing,” or even “narcissism.” People without knowledge of what these words mean misapply them, leading to a water-downing of the original meaning.

That doesn’t mean we don’t need words for these things, even if new words have to take their place or greater education is required to reinforce the original meaning.

The original term queerbaiting is still useful. There are parts of the LGBTQIA2+ alphabet that do not have much representation in media, especially for those living in countries where such representation is legislatively discriminated against or illegal.

Capitalist firms are motivated to attract as many audiences as possible. And when one of those audiences cannot be recognized — either legally or because they are taboo — then it makes a cold kind of sense that companies will do the minimum possible to maintain that audience without alienating their more conservative viewers.

It’s helpful to call that marketing out because it’s useful to describe the hurtful dynamics around us — to say that we are not crazy. That queerbaiting has happened to our community and that it continues to happen.

What we choose to call that process in the future is up to us.

Netflix’s ‘Kaos’ Takes the Misogyny out of Greek Myths

Image; Netflix

Picture this: You are watching a movie, reading a book, or consuming a piece of media that does not sit right with you. Perhaps you don’t like the Happily Ever After (or lack thereof) established for a side character or how the women characters on the show are treated, and you tell yourself: ‘I wish it had gone this way instead.’

This impulse is front and center with Charlie Covell’s latest outing on Netflix, Kaos (2024-present), a show that brings Greek mythology to the 20th century. We see some of our oldest stories told in a more modern framing: Zeus in a tracksuit, an underworld run like the TSA, and, for our purpose today, a retelling of old tales with modern, feminist sensibilities.

Recontextualizing Medusa

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a bit of a feminist recontextualization of Greek myths, which originally, due to the misogyny of Greek society, were quite sexist.

As a classic example, take the character Medusa — the only Gorgon born a mortal and, consequently, not naturally “monstrous.” She was considered so beautiful that Posedein, the God of the Sea, lusted after her beauty, having sex with her in the temple of Athena. Depending on the version of the tale, the consent of this interaction can be quite dubious by modern standards. As Emily Wenstrom writes in Book Riot:

“…depending on which [version] you pick up, either Medusa seduced Poseidon or he was smitten with her and took her. In other words, the mythology of Medusa holds within it a classic he said/she said story of rape and victim blaming.”

And this interaction is not the end of the story. Athena is so enraged by this violation of her temple grounds that she punishes Medusa (not Posiden, whose too big to fail) for being “boastful.” The goddess transforms Medusa into a creature with snakes on her head and a face so “hideous” that it petrifies all those who look at her.

Dated is probably too charitable to describe this story. A woman suffering a violent transformation because of a God raping her does not sit well with a lot of modern viewers because it flies in the face of everything we think about modern notions of consent.

And so, in recent years, Medusa has been depicted as more of a tragic figure who was wronged by the Gods. An early example is the 2010 book Retelling: Set in Stone by author R.C. Berry, where Medusa is portrayed as a naive teen caught in the crossfire of the gods and becomes emotionally hardened as a result.

The Charmed reboot (2022) has an entire episode where the character Medusa is redeemed (see Switches & Stones). She is summoned accidentally by a sister in a college sorority who we learn has been slut shamed by her peers. Medusa is there to bring justice and starts petrifying the complicit sorority and fraternity members. The protagonists, the Charmed Ones, do not slay her for this but instead validate the Gorgon’s story. The Charmed sister, Macy (Madeleine Mantock), saying:

“I see you. And I'm not going to turn away. You were cursed to cover up the crime of a powerful man. So that no one would ever see your pain. But I see it and I am so sorry. Know that you are not to blame.”

In the Disney+ show Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2023-present), the main character’s mother explicitly tells her son not to view Medusa in an entirely negative light: “Not everyone who looks like a hero is a hero, and not everyone who looks like a monster is a monster” she lectures about the mythological figure.

Kaos expands upon this tradition by showing us a Medusa who is not merely a victim of the Gods — although she certainly is — but someone who wants her revenge. She is a burnt-out worker trying to keep the cogs of the Underworld running, and secretly, she is a radical working with heretics who want to bring down the Gods.

We have a character rather than an object, and she is not the only example of this on the show.

Retelling Orpheus and Eurydice

We see a similar recontextualization in Kaos with its retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, which is my favorite adaptation of the entire show.

For those unaware, the core of this story has traditionally been about a woman, the titular Eurydice, dying tragically, and then her lover Orpheus trying to return her to the land of the living. Orpheus walks to hell and back for the sake of his love, but it’s not a happy ending. The God of the Underworld, Hades, only lets Orpheus leave with Eurydice if he promises not to look back at her while they make their journey.

It’s a challenge he fails, forcing Eurydice to return to the Underworld alone.

One of the bigger feminist critiques of this myth is that Eurydice has little agency (i.e., she doesn’t make decisions) in the story. She is an object for Orpheus to pursue and learn from.

And so more modern texts have been trying to change that so Eurydice is not as passive in their stories. The musical Hadestown (2006), for example, focuses just as much on developing Eurydice as Orpheus. We come to know her as someone molded by the harsh realities of a world where Fall and Spring do not come (see Any Way the Wind Blows).

Even her death is reframed not as an event that happens to her, usually via a snake bite, but something she chooses to do due to the harsh conditions of the season. She is out gathering food, lost in a storm, separated from Orpheus, and on the verge of death. She is tired, and when Hades gives her a way out — death via a snake bite — she takes it.

The story portrays Orpheus as neglectful. He was held up in his home, working on his music to make the Gods return Spring and Fall, and he left the work of surviving all to Eurydice. She arguably died because he didn’t help her, and the text lets the viewer know it. When Orpheus asks Hermes, the Messengers of the Gods, where Eurydice is, he mocks Orpheus, singing:

“Brother, what do you care? You’ll find another muse somewhere.”

We see a familiar beat in the video game Hades (2020), which takes place after the couple’s failed journey to the Underworld. Now, both of them are dead, and Eurydice is angry with Orpheus for failing to save her. She instructs your player to tell Orpheus she’s doing fine without him when you first bring the subject up.

Kaos takes a similar approach to these other texts, but it’s by far the most direct of these recontextualizations I have seen. Orpheus is not a villain, but he’s not a hero either. He is the reason why Eurydice does not reincarnate, as he refuses to place her coin — the payment she needs to pass on — on her casket.

His attachment to her is so toxic that Eurydice falls out of love with him well before she ever arrives in the Underworld. She is suffocated by his need, something we see metaphorically represented in the song Eurydice, where he sings possessive lyrics such as “Is it a little too much. Breathin’ the air from your lungs?”

He didn’t neglect to put the coin on her grave to save her, but because, selfishly, he couldn’t let her go.

When they finally reconnect — and I am going to avoid the more plot elements — she is grateful for his rescue, but she does not become the reward for his efforts. They still break up, and in a twist, I found to be frankly brilliant, Orpheus cannot look at Eurydice, not because of a grand bargain with the God Hades, but because he is hurt by their breakup.

He cannot bring himself to look at her because of her decision, which has an entirely different focus from the original myth.

A mythical conclusion

Greek myths have been the subject of feminist reinvention for decades, and Kaos is no different. We focused briefly on how it ties into a feminist reimagining of the myths of Medusa as well as Orpheus and Eurydice, but we could have also expanded our focus to the story of Ariadne, the Furys, Hades and Persephone, and many more.

There’s a lot here that I encourage you to check out. Kaos is a show that effortlessly interweaves many different stories together in a way that doesn’t feel clunky and updates them to reflect modern sensibilities.

And I’m thankful for that. Because while the ancient Greeks told sexist stories, it’s refreshing to see them remixed into something a little easier to swallow.